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Alasdair MacIntyre

The contribution to contemporary philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre is incon-testably enormous. His writings on ethics, political philosophy, the philosophyof religion, the philosophy of the social sciences, and the history of philosophyhave established him as one of the philosophical giants of the last fifty years. Hisbest-known book, After Virtue (1981), spurred the profound revival of virtueethics.Moreover,MacIntyre, unlike somany of his contemporaries, has exerteda deep influence beyond the bounds of academic philosophy.This volume focuses on the major themes of MacIntyre’s work, with crit-

ical expositions of MacIntyre’s views on the history of philosophy, the role oftradition in philosophical inquiry, the philosophy of the social sciences, moralphilosophy, political theory, and his critique of the assumptions and institutionsof modernity.Written by a distinguished roster of philosophers, this volume will have an

unusually wide appeal outside philosophy to students in the social sciences, law,theology, and political theory.

Mark C. Murphy is Associate Professor of Philosophy at GeorgetownUniversity.

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AlasdairMacIntyre

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MARK C. MURPHYGeorgetown University

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For Jane and Tom Ryan

Contents

List of Contributors page xi

Introduction 1mark c. murphy

1 MacIntyre on History and Philosophy 10gordon graham

2 Tradition in the Recent Work of Alasdair MacIntyre 38jean porter

3 MacIntyre in the Province of the Philosophy of theSocial Sciences 70stephen p. turner

4 Modern(ist) Moral Philosophy and MacIntyrean Critique 94j. l. a. garcia

5 MacIntyre and Contemporary Moral Philosophy 114david solomon

6 MacIntyre’s Political Philosophy 152mark c. murphy

7 MacIntyre’s Critique of Modernity 176terry pinkard

Bibliography 201

Index 221

ix

Contributors

J . L . A . GARCIA is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. His workspansmetaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics, and he also writes onphilosophical sociology. Amonghis papers are “DoubleEffect,”Encyclopediaof Bioethics, ed. Warren Reich, second edition (1995); “The New Critiqueof Anti-Consequentialist Moral Theory,” Philosophical Studies 71 (1993);“The Tunsollen, the Seinsollen, and the Soseinsollen,” American PhilosophicalQuarterly 23 (1986); and “Goods and Evils,” Philosophy and PhenomenologicalResearch 47 (1987). He is currently at work on The Heart of Racism, a bookof essays.

GORDON GRAHAM is Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at theUniversity of Aberdeen, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, andeditor of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy. He has published extensivelyin aesthetics, ethics, applied philosophy, and the philosophy of history. Hismost recent books areThe Shape of the Past: A Philosophical Approach toHistory(1997), Philosophy of the Arts, second edition (2000), Evil and Christian Ethics(Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry(2002).

MARK C. MURPHY is Associate Professor of Philosophy at GeorgetownUniversity. He writes on ethics, political philosophy, the philosophy oflaw, the philosophy of religion, and the moral and political theory ofThomas Hobbes. He is the author of Natural Law and Practical Rationality(Cambridge University Press, 2001) and An Essay on Divine Authority(2002).

TERRY PINKARD is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University.His research interests coverGerman philosophy as well as political philoso-phy and the philosophy of law.He is the author ofHegel’s Phenomenology: TheSociality of Reason (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Hegel: A Biography(Cambridge University Press, 2000), and German Philosophy 1760–1860:The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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xii Contributors

JEAN PORTER is John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology at the Universityof Notre Dame. Working primarily in moral theology, she is the authorof numerous articles as well as of Natural and Divine Law: Reclaimingthe Tradition for Christian Ethics (1999), Moral Action and Christian Ethics(Cambridge University Press, 1995), and The Recovery of Virtue: TheRelevance of Aquinas for Christian Ethics (1990).

DAVID SOLOMON is Associate Professor and H. P. and W. B. WhiteDirector of the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of NotreDame.His work focuses on normative and applied ethics. Among his papersare “Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics,”Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13(1988), and “MoralRealism and theAmoralist,”Midwest Studies in Philosophy12 (1987). He is currently working on a book on the revival of virtue ethicsin contemporary moral philosophy.

STEPHEN P. TURNER is Graduate Research Professor and Chair ofPhilosophy at theUniversity of SouthFlorida.Hehaswritten extensively onthe philosophy of social science and the history of social science, includingseveral books onMaxWeber. He edited The Cambridge Companion to Weberand recently coedited, with Paul Roth, the Blackwell Guide to the Philosophyof Social Science. His most recent books are Brains/Practices/Relativism: SocialTheory after Cognitive Science (2002) and Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Societyin an Age of Expertise (2002).

Alasdair MacIntyre

IntroductionM A R K C . M U R P H Y

In a 1991 interview, Alasdair MacIntyre summarized the history of his ownphilosophical work as follows:

My life as an academic philosopher falls into three parts. The twenty-two years from 1949, when I became a graduate student of philosophyat Manchester University, until 1971 were a period, as it now appearsretrospectively, of heterogeneous, badly organized, sometimes fragmentedand often frustrating and messy enquiries, from which nonetheless in theend I learned a lot. From 1971, shortly after I emigrated to the UnitedStates, until 1977 was an interim period of sometimes painfully self-criticalreflection. . . . From 1977 onwards I have been engaged in a single projectto which After Virtue [1981],Whose Justice? Which Rationality? [1988], andThree Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry [1990] are central. (MacIntyre 1991a,pp. 268–269)

The seven chapters that follow deal, for the most part,1 with aspects ofMacIntyre’s mature position, the theses that have emerged from the “singleproject” – I will call this, for shorthand, the “After Virtue project” – towhich After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Three Rival Versionsof Moral Enquiry, and (since that interview) Dependent Rational Animals(1999) have contributed. My aim in this Introduction is to provide, albeitsketchily, some context for the emergence of MacIntyre’s mature view. Iwant to say something, that is, about the pre-1971 inquiries that he labels“fragmented.” It is true that MacIntyre’s writings during this period areremarkably diverse in the topics treated, in the styles employed, and in thefora in which they appeared. One does not find the singleness of purposeand the coherence of thought thatmark his later work. But there is nonethe-less a set of concerns and commitments exhibited in these writings thatmakes intelligible the trajectory of MacIntyre’s work to and beyond AfterVirtue.

1

2 MARK C. MURPHY

1. SOCIAL CRITICISM, IDEOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY

The direction of MacIntyre’s early work is made intelligible by his searchfor an adequate standpoint from which to engage in large-scale social crit-icism, his conviction that Marxism was the most promising standpoint onoffer, and his view that available formulations of Marxist doctrine werenonetheless ultimately inadequate to this task.MacIntyre’s intellectual work has always been at the service of social

criticism. (This is true not only of his early writings, but also of the workbelonging to the After Virtue project. The notion that the MacIntyre ofthe After Virtue project is some sort of social and political conservative isgiven the lie by the extent to which his later work emphasizes the ways inwhich virtue theory and natural law ethics are countercultural and indeedrevolutionary: see, e.g., “Sophrosune: How a Virtue Can Become SociallyDisruptive” [MacIntyre 1988c] and “Natural Law as Subversive: The Caseof Aquinas” [1996a]. See also Knight 1996.) The social criticism to whichMacIntyre aspired, though, was not a piecemeal affair but rather a system-atic inquiry into the defectiveness of modern social, cultural, economic,and political institutions. To engage in such systematic critique requires astandpoint from which to carry out such criticism. MacIntyre shows him-self in his early work to be preoccupied with major ideologies – Marxism,psychoanalysis, and Christianity are at the center of his focus – that claimto be able to diagnose the ills of modernity and to point the way to a cure.“Ideology” is employed by many writers in a merely pejorative fash-

ion. (This is no doubt in part a manifestation of the conviction thatwe have moved beyond the need for ideology – a conviction which, asMacIntyre has argued, seems all too clearly to be itself an ideology; seeMacIntyre 1971b, p. 5.) But ideologies as MacIntyre understood them of-fer the promise of affording a standpoint for large-scale social criticism.Ideologies, MacIntyre wrote, have three central features. First, they ascribeproperties to the world beyond simply those knowable by empirical in-vestigation. Second, they concern both fact and value, offering an accountboth of the way the world is and how it ought to be; they offer a particularpicture of the relationship between these factual and evaluative domains.And third, ideologies make themselves manifest in such a way that theydefine the social lives of their adherents (MacIntyre 1971a, pp. 5–7).2 It istrue that ideologies can isolate themselves from philosophical and socio-logical challenge so that they become barren, contentless. But in offeringa systematic picture of the world, one that can unite the factual and eval-uative realms and can be entrenched in the social lives of its adherents, an

Introduction 3

adequate ideology is in the vicinity of what one who seeks to engage inwholesale social criticism should be looking for.The standpoint in terms of which MacIntyre’s early work is articulated

is a Marxist one. He was at one time a member of the Communist Party(though he left the Party prior to Khruschev’s revelations about the moralhorrors of the Stalinist regime) and continued to be active in socialist causes(Knight 1998, p. 2). But MacIntyre’s commitment to Marxism coexistedwith deep uneasiness about its ultimate adequacy. Marxism, MacIntyrewrote, has been refuted a number of times; its staying power can be due onlyto its capacity to articulate truths that are not articulable in other ideologicalframeworks (Marxism and Christianity, pp. 117–118). What MacIntyre hadin mind, I take it, was Marxism’s account of the distorting effects on hu-man life and human relationships produced by the economic and politicalinstitutions of modern capitalism:

When man as a worker becomes himself a commodity, he is fundamentallyalienated, estranged from himself. Under the form of labour, man sees him-self as a commodity, as an object. Hence as labour he objectifies, externaliseshis own existence. A consequence of this is that life becomes not somethingwhich he enjoys as part of his essential humanity. . . .[T]o be human is to be estranged. But when man is a being divided

against himself, able to envision himself as a commodity, he breaks thecommunity of man with man. (Marxism: An Interpretation, p. 50)

It is because MacIntyre took Marxism to be fundamentally right on thesepoints that he had an allegiance to that viewpoint. In fact, MacIntyre’sallegiance to this view of the destructive character of the institutions ofcapitalism, including the modern bureaucratic state, has remained entirelyunaltered to the present day; it is, MacIntyre has acknowledged, one ofthe few points on which he has not held different views at different pointsin his academic career (see MacIntyre 1994b, pp. 35, 44). Still, MacIntyrewas unable to ally himself with any of the formulations of Marxist thoughtavailable to him: neither Stalinist “scientific socialism” nor the humanist al-ternatives to Stalinism popular within the British New Left were ultimatelysustainable.3

The facing of a choice between these understandings of Marxism wasnot, by anymeans, an unfamiliar experience forMarxists.Marxists had facedsuch a stark choice at least since the formulations of scientific Marxism byKarl Kautsky and of revisionist, humanistic Marxism by Eduard Bernstein(see Kautsky 1906 [1914] and Bernstein 1899 [1993]; for a helpful dis-cussion of these views, see Hudelson 1990, pp. 3–28). Scientific Marxism

4 MARK C. MURPHY

emphasizes the notion of Marxism as social science, as articulating lawsof social, political, and economic development and transformation that in-dicate the inevitable path through capitalism and eventually to socialism.Humanistic Marxism, on the other hand, emphasizes the moral elementof Marxism, offering a critical account of the moral failures of capitalistsociety, of the morally imperative character of socialism, and of the morallyappropriate means to transform capitalist modes of life into socialist modesof life. Scientific Marxism, one might say, is the Marxism of ‘is’; humanisticMarxism is the Marxism of ‘ought’.MacIntyre’s early writings take both of these modes of Marxist theoriz-

ing as targets. Understood as an inevitabilist account of the developmentof social forms, scientific Marxism faces, on MacIntyre’s view, two insu-perable difficulties. First, to take the content of Marxism to be simply aset of social scientific laws is to make Marxism into no more than a toolfor those in power to manipulate social change, an instruction manual forhow the masses can be manipulated by those in power. It is precisely thisunderstanding of Marxism that is central to Stalinist socialism, in whichthe state’s role was one of adjusting the levers and pushing the buttons thatcould ultimately bring about universal socialism. Because that perspectivewas entirely value-free, there were no ways of adjusting the levers and push-ing the buttons that could be morally called into question. If there were nomore toMarxism than an account of correlations between historical, social,economic, and political states of affairs, then purges,mass killings, and showtrials – if employed as a part of those conditions that ultimately bring aboutuniversal socialism – could not be criticized from a Marxist standpoint.Thus one fundamental criticism leveled by MacIntyre against the scientificMarxist standpoint was that it was morally empty (MacIntyre 1958, p. 32).The other criticism leveled by MacIntyre against this standpoint was thatit was, to put it bluntly, false: there are no social scientific laws available tobe discovered that would enable the would-be central planner to adjust thelevers to bring about the downfall of capitalism and the rise of socialism.Features of human agency preclude the possibility of adequately formulat-ing any such laws (see Marxism and Christianity, pp. 82–86; After Virtue,pp. 88–102). Scientific Marxism is not only morally empty, it is scientificallyempty.It is not surprising, then, that MacIntyre would express admiration for

those Marxists who rejected Stalinist socialism on moral grounds. Onemight also expect MacIntyre to side with the humanistic Marxists; indeed,one recent chronicler of the development of MacIntyre’s views has assertedthat MacIntyre is clearly in this camp (McMylor 1994, p. 12). But while it

Introduction 5

is true that MacIntyre’s commitment to Marxism came on account of itscapacity to bring into the open the deformities in social relations prevalentin capitalist societies, even early on MacIntyre expressed little confidencethat a standpoint could be found from which Stalinist horrors could becriticized and the moral content of Marxism vindicated. Bernstein, writingat the end of the nineteenth century, shows no signs of worry concerningthe vindication of the moral content of Marxism; perhaps this is becauseof his confidence in a generally Kantian philosophical view that personsare never to be treated as mere means but always as ends-in-themselves.MacIntyre, writing in the mid-twentieth century, has no such confidence.It is not at all surprising that MacIntyre would lack confidence on

this score. In the 1950’s, the dominant theoretical viewpoints in Anglo-Americanmoral philosophy were versions of emotivism and prescriptivism,according to which moral judgment consists simply in (respectively) ex-pression of emotion (e.g., “rigged trials are wrong” means something like“rigged trials – boo!”) or articulation of preference (e.g., “rigged trials arewrong” means something like “let rigged trials not take place”). WhatMacIntyre cannot see is how, given these understandings of moral judg-ment, we are to account for the authority purported in moral approval andcondemnation. When the humanist Marxist condemns the techniques ofStalinist socialism, what is the authority wielded in that condemnation? Ifall that is going on in such criticism is the critic’s reaffirmation of his orher disapproval of the Stalinist’s techniques, why on earth should anyonelisten to him or her? (Marxism and Christianity, pp. 124–127; see also AfterVirtue, p. 68.) The moral critic of Stalinism, wrote MacIntyre, is “often afigure of genuine pathos” (MacIntyre 1958, p. 31). MacIntyre in his earlywork is just such a figure.

2. IS THERE A PATH OUT OF THE “MORAL WILDERNESS”?

MacIntyre confronted the Stalinist and the Stalinist’s moral critic, thehumanist, in a two-part essay written for theNew Reasoner4 in 1958 entitled“Notes from theMoralWilderness.” In it he diagnoses the difficulties in thehumanist’s position as rooted in the humanist’s acceptance of the autonomyof moral principle, that is, that the province of the moral stands indepen-dently of and in contrast to the province of natural, social, and historicalfacts. By cutting the domain ofmoral judgment off from the domains of his-tory, sociology, economics, and anthropology, the moral critic of Stalinismcuts him- or herself off from any argumentative route to his or her moral

6 MARK C. MURPHY

conclusions (see also Marxism and Christianity, p. 124). All that remains isarbitrary choice – I approve of these values, I prefer this way of life to thatone. But this isolation renders moral criticism ineffective and moral evalu-ation unintelligible. Such an understanding of morality allows the Stalinistto play the choice game as well: “If [the moral critic of Stalinism] chooseshis values in the spirit ofHier steh’ ich, ich kann nicht anders, is it not equallyopen to [the Stalinist] to do the same?” (MacIntyre 1958, p. 35) Moralitythus cut off from other realms of judgment and inquiry becomes “like prim-itive taboos, imperatives which we just happen to utter. It is to turn ‘ought’into a kind of nervous cough with which we accompany what we hopewill be the more impressive of our pronouncements” (MacIntyre 1959b,p. 42).5

Both the scientific socialist and the humanist, in their own ways, severthe connection between the factual and the evaluative, and thus preclude thepossibility of social criticism from an authoritative moral standpoint. Thescientific socialist does so by treating the realm of moral judgment asillusory ormerely epiphenomenal; the humanist does so by stripping it of itsauthority.What is needed is amiddleway – away to connectmorality tightlyenough to history, sociology, psychology, and other domains to preclude itfrom being a matter of mere preference or choice, but not so tightly thatwhat ought to be becomes simply what is guaranteed to be. MacIntyre suggeststhat this middle way can be achieved by connecting ethics with what wemight call authentic human desire, desire that is not warped or distorted(MacIntyre 1959b, pp. 46–47). Thus morality is grounded in the ‘is’ of de-sire, but is not subsumed by it, for he allows that it is authentic desire, notdesire that is deformed, that is the standard for moral judgment. The trickis to explain what theMarxist critique of capitalist society presupposes: thatwe can explain in a non-question-begging way why it is that certain formsof social life distort desire, and precisely how they do so. What is needed,MacIntyre writes, is a “concept of human nature, a concept which has to bethe centre of any discussion of moral theory” (MacIntyre 1959b, p. 45). Inproviding such an account, we will have to bemindful of the extent to whichhuman nature is historically conditioned, and we will have to be mindfulthat the ethics that we endorse can be institutionalized. As MacIntyre re-minds us from his very early work onward, there is no morality for rationalbeings as such; there is onlymorality for human beings, as practiced at sometime, in some social setting.Any adequate ethic, then, would have to be historically situated. But

MacIntyre realized – in part as a result of an early attempt to write anadequate history of ethics, his 1966 A Short History of Ethics (MacIntyre

Introduction 7

1991d, p. 260) – that to make the historical condition of human beings apart of the substance of an ethical view is inadequate. It would be, to saythe least, paradoxical to hold that the norms of conduct, the virtues andrules that govern the life of a good person, are historically conditionedand exist only as concretely realized in social life, but also to hold that thecriteria of rational justification by which we show that this is the correctview of morality are entirely ahistorical and exist apart from the practicesof any community of inquiry. History, if it is to enter ethics at the levelof substantive moral theory, must also enter at the metalevel, the level atwhich substantive theories of morality are justified. Such appeals to historycharacteristically bring with them worries that such a view will fall into asoggy relativism. It would hardly be a victory for MacIntyre’s alternativeroute in moral theory if that route were justified only according to a theoryof rational inquiry that is itself not superior to any of the various theoriesof rational inquiry that might reject that route.The path out of the moral wilderness is the formulation of an ethics of

human nature – where human nature is not merely a biological nature butalso an historical and social nature – and the formulation of an historical,but not relativistic, account of rationality in inquiry. Only accounts suchas these would make possible authoritative political and social criticism.The vindication of such a substantive moral outlook, and of a theory ofrationality in inquiry that would sustain that outlook, are the central tasksof the After Virtue project.6

3. THE AFTER VIRTUE PROJECT

The conclusions tentatively reached byMacIntyre in his early writings con-cern both what the substance of an adequate morality would be like andwhat a conception of rationality needed to show the superiority of this sub-stantial morality would have to be like. The chapters in this volume explainhow these tentative conclusions reached in MacIntyre’s early work havebeen developed and connected to each other in MacIntyre’s mature posi-tion. Gordon Graham (“MacIntyre on History and Philosophy”) consid-ers MacIntyre’s views on the relationship between history and philosophy,views that culminate in MacIntyre’s notion of a tradition of inquiry. JeanPorter (“Tradition in the Recent Work of Alasdair MacIntyre”) takes upthis notion of tradition in greater detail, analyzing its development overthe various works that constitute the After Virtue project. Stephen Turnerwrites on MacIntyre’s contributions to the philosophy of social science

8 MARK C. MURPHY

(“MacIntyre in the Province of the Philosophy of the Social Sciences”),contributions that inform (and are informed by) MacIntyre’s views on ra-tionality,morality, and politics. J. L. A.Garcia andDavid Solomon present apicture of the negative and positive (respectively) sides of MacIntyre’s sub-stantive moral theory: Garcia’s chapter (“Modern(ist) Moral Philosophyand MacIntyrean Critique”) lays out MacIntyre’s criticisms of modernmoral philosophy, while Solomon’s (“MacIntyre and Contemporary MoralPhilosophy”) shows how that critique developed into MacIntyre’s own dis-tinctive version of Aristotelian ethics. I (“MacIntyre’s Political Philosophy”)discuss MacIntyre’s views on political philosophy, focusing on MacIntyre’spreoccupation with themodern state. Terry Pinkard (“MacIntyre’s Critiqueof Modernity”) concludes the collection by considering MacIntyre’s crit-icisms of the assumptions and institutions of modernity, trying to makeclear the ways in which MacIntyre is, and is not, himself a modern. Aselected bibliography of MacIntyre’s books and most important papersfollows.

Notes

1. The exception isChapter 3,which dealswithMacIntyre’s views on the philosophyof social science. While MacIntyre has continued to write in this area, his mainpositions were developed along the way to, and play a central role in, AfterVirtue.

2. It seems to me that the notion of “tradition,” which plays such a central role inthe After Virtue project (see Chapter 2), is a recognizable successor concept to“ideology.”

3. For a discussion of the extent to which the British New Left had its origins inKhruschev’s revelations concerning the horrors of the Stalin regime, see Chun1993, pp. 1–4.

4. The New Reasoner was an independent journal of socialist thought, foundedby E. P. Thompson – an ex-Communist party member – in order to providea forum in which more adequate debate and criticism of socialist principles andpolicy could take place. It was published from 1957 to 1959, at which point itmerged with another journal, Universities and Left Review, to form the New LeftReview.

5. The comparison of the institutions of morality to the institutions of taboo is atheme to whichMacIntyre has returned over and over again in his career: see, forexamples, the 1981 After Virtue, pp. 110–113, and the 1990 Three Rival Versions,pp. 182–186.

6. It is worth reemphasizing that in carrying this inquiry forward,MacIntyre did nottakehimself to be introducing elements intoMarxism thatwere entirely foreign toit, but rather to beworking through the problematic internal toMarxism. In criti-cizing contemporaryMarxist philosophy on account of its intellectual stagnation,

Introduction 9

MacIntyre lays out what he takes to be the central tasks facing philosophers whohave allegiance to a Marxist viewpoint:Marx was intimately concerned with two problems that necessarily arisefor everyone who engages seriously in philosophy. He was concernedwith the perspective of ultimate belief, with the problems which engagethe philosophy of religion; and he was concerned with the question of howthe philosopher should relate himself to his philosophy and the sense inwhich philosophy can or cannot affect one’s ultimate views and commit-ments. (MacIntyre 1956, p. 370)

While the bulk ofMacIntyre’s work early in his career is concerned with rival ide-ologies, and in particular their relevance for social criticism, he also did a fair bitof work squarely in the philosophy of religion: he co-edited (with Antony Flew)New Essays in Philosophical Theology and wrote papers on immortality (1955c),visions (1955d), the logical status of religious belief (1957b), atheism (Atheism,pp. 1–55), and other topics in the philosophy of religion. This book does notcontain a chapter on MacIntyre’s philosophical theology because it has not beena focus of much of his work during the After Virtue project. (But see 1986c and1994a.)

1 MacIntyre on History and PhilosophyG O R D O N G R A H A M

In An Autobiography, R. G. Collingwood writes:

The Oxford philosophical tradition insisted upon a fine training in philo-sophical scholarship. Under the reign of ‘realism’ this tradition certainlysurvived but it weakened year by year. When I myself examined in the mid-dle 1920’s I found that very few candidates showed any first hand knowledgeof any authors about whom they wrote. . . . This decline in philosophicalhistory was openly encouraged by the ‘realists’; it was one of their mostrespected leaders who, expressly on the ground that the ‘history’ of phi-losophy was a subject without philosophical interest, procured the abo-lition of the paper so entitled in the school of Philosophy, Politics andEconomics.During the war . . . I set myself to reconsider this ‘realist’ attitude

towards the history of philosophy.Was it really true, I askedmyself, that theproblems of philosophy were, even in the loosest sense of that word, eter-nal? Was it really true that different philosophies were different attemptsto answer the same questions? I soon discovered that it was not true; it wasmerely a vulgar error, consequent on a kind of historical myopia which,deceived by superficial resemblances, failed to detect profound differences.(Collingwood 1938, pp. 60–61)

For Collingwood to convince those locked in this historical myopia other-wise, however, was not an easy matter, because of the readiness with whichthey argued in a circle.

It was like having a nightmare about a man who got it into his head thattrireme was the Greek for ‘steamer’, and when it was pointed out to himthat descriptions of triremes inGreek writers were at any rate not very gooddescriptions of steamers, replied triumphantly, ‘That is justwhat I say.TheseGreek philosophers (or, ‘these modern philosophers’, according to whichside he was on in the good old controversy between the Ancients and theModerns) ‘were terribly muddle-headed, and their theory of steamers is allwrong’. (Collingwood 1938, p. 64)

10

MacIntyre on History and Philosophy 11

Almost exactly the same charge that Collingwood here levels againstthe Oxford realists of the 1920s and 1930s was repeated forty years laterby Alasdair MacIntyre, and also against Oxford philosophy, this time in itslinguistic rather than its realist incarnation. The opening of MacIntyre’sA Short History of Ethics (1966) is strikingly similar in sentiment toCollingwood.

Moral philosophy is often written as though the history of the subject wereonly of secondary and incidental importance. This attitude seems to be theoutcome of a belief that moral concepts can be examined and understoodapart from their history. Some philosophers have even written as if moralconcepts were a timeless, limited, unchanging, determinate species of con-cept, necessarily having the same features throughout their history, so thatthere is a part of language waiting to be philosophically investigated whichdeserves the title “the language of morals” (with a definite article and a sin-gular noun). . . . In fact, of course, moral concepts change . . . and it wouldbe a fatal mistake to write as if, in the history of moral philosophy, therehad been one single task of analyzing the concept of, for example, justice, tothe performance of which Plato, Hobbes, and Bentham all set themselves.(Short History, pp. 1–2)

MacIntyre himself notes (in After Virtue) that the relation betweenhistory and philosophy informed his approach to the subject from thestart.

A central theme of much of [my] earlier work (Secularization and MoralChange, 1967; Against the Self-Images of the Age, 1971) was that we haveto learn from history and anthropology of the variety of moral practices,beliefs and conceptual schemes. The notion that the moral philosophercan study the concepts of morality merely by reflecting, Oxford armchairstyle, on what he or she and those around him or her say or do is barren.(After Virtue, p. ix)

Omitted from the first of these quotations is an intervening passage ofequal importance:

In fact moral concepts change as social life changes. I deliberately do notwrite “because social life changes” for this might suggest that social life isone thing,morality another, and that there is merely an external, contingentcausal relation between them. This is obviously false. Moral concepts areembodied in and are partially constitutive of forms of social life. (ShortHistory, p. 1)

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No less important, for my purposes, is a subsequent remark:

The complexity [of the relationship between social life and moral concepts]is increased because philosophical inquiry itself plays a part in changingmoral concepts. It is not that we have a straightforward history of moralconcepts and then a separate and secondary history of philosophical com-ment. For to analyze a concept philosophically may often be to assist in itstransformation. . . . The moral concepts which are available for analysis tothe philosophers of one age may sometimes be what they are partly becauseof the discussions by philosophers of a previous age. [Moreover,] A historywhich takes this point seriously, which is concerned with the role of philos-ophy in relation to actual conduct, cannot be philosophically neutral. (ShortHistory, pp. 2–3)

These quotations make plain that, as one commentator remarks,“[o]vercoming the double barrenness of detached philosophy and mind-less history has been an . . . aim promoted by MacIntyre throughout hiscareer” (Wokler 1994, p. 168). Yet, as it seems to me, it is not altogetherclear how the historical and the philosophical are interconnected. Thereare at least three important, and importantly different, contentions aboutthe relation between history and philosophy embedded in these remarks.The first is that moral philosophy cannot ignore the course of social historyif it is to pursue its own ends satisfactorily. The second is that philosophicalinquiry and the exploration of ideas can affect the way social history goes.And the third, a rather deeper contention to my mind, is that the adequacyof philosophical thought is itself a product of history.There is nodoubt that together these three contentions provide both the

foundation and the distinguishingmark of a philosophical program pursuedwith remarkable consistency over four decades or more. The question ishow, and whether, they can be made to cohere. In this essay I propose toexplore each of these three contentions as they are elaborated byMacIntyrein his major works, concluding with a brief discussion of the new turn histhought has taken in his most recent book, Dependent Rational Animals.At the outset, though, it is important to add two caveats. First, such

a relatively simple scheme of analysis is unlikely to do full justice to therich complexity of his thought and writing; second, my concern is not topass judgment on the success or failure of MacIntyre’s whole project, butmerely to examine the conceptual relations between the historical and thephilosophical that it may be taken to imply.An important illustration of the first of these contentions – that moral

philosophy cannot ignore the course of social history if it is to pursue its


own ends satisfactorily – is to be found in the “disquieting suggestion” withwhich After Virtue opens. The second – that philosophical inquiry and theexploration of ideas can affect the trajectory of social history – makes oneof its most striking appearances in MacIntyre’s account, in Whose Justice?Which Rationality?, of the place of philosophy in the social order of eigh-teenth century Scotland. And the third – that the adequacy of philosoph-ical thought is itself a product of history – comes to prominence, as onemight expect, in exploring the relativemerits ofThree Rival Versions ofMoralEnquiry, and in the defense of the concept of an intellectual tradition thatis to be found there.

1. SOCIAL HISTORY AND THE LANGUAGE OF MORALS

After Virtue famously begins with an analogy:

Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe.A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on thescientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicistsare lynched, books and instruments are destroyed. Finally a Know-Nothingpolitical movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teach-ing in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remainingscientists. Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movementand enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largelyforgotten what it was. But all that they possess are fragments: a knowledgeof the experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical contextwhich gave them significance. . . . None the less all these fragments are re-embodied in a set of practices which go under the revived names of physics,chemistry and biology. Adults argue with each other about the respectivemerits of relativity theory and phlogiston theory, although they possess onlya very partial knowledge of each. Children learn by heart the surviving por-tions of the periodic table and recite as incantations some of the theoremsof Euclid. Nobody, or almost nobody, realizes that what they are doing isnot natural science in any proper sense at all. For everything that they doand say conforms to certain canons of consistency and coherence and thosecontexts which would be needed to make sense of what they are doing havebeen lost, perhaps irretrievably.In such a culture men would use expressions such as ‘neutrino’, ‘mass’,

‘specific gravity’, ‘atomic weight’ in systematic and often interrelated wayswhich would resemble in lesser or greater degrees the ways in which suchexpressions had been used in earlier times before scientific knowledge had

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been so largely lost. But many of the beliefs presupposed by the use of theseexpressions would have been lost and there would appear to be an elementof arbitrariness and even of choice in their application which would appearvery surprising to us. . . . Subjectivist theories of science would abound andwould be criticized by those who held that the notion of truth embodied inwhat they took to be science was incompatible with subjectivism.This imaginary world [w]e may describe . . . as a world in which the

language of natural science . . . continues to be used but is in a grave stateof disorder. We may notice that if in this imaginary world analytical phi-losophy were to flourish, it would never reveal the fact of this disorder. Forthe techniques of analytical philosophy are essentially descriptive of thelanguage of the present. . . .Nor again would phenomenology or existentialism be able to discern

anything wrong. . . . A Husserl or a Merleau-Ponty would be as deceived asa Strawson or a Quine.What is the point of constructing this imaginary world inhabited by

fictitious pseudo-scientists and real, genuine philosophy? The hypothesis Iwish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language ofmorality is in the same state of grave disorder. . . .What we possess, if thisview is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme. . . .Wepossess indeedthe simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions.But we have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, boththeoretical and practical, of morality. (After Virtue, pp. 1–2)

Science, of course, is not in this condition; there has been no catastro-phe of this sort in its history. But morality is.What we think of as ‘morality’today is no more than the dislocated remains of a once coherent and so-cially embedded set of practices. According to MacIntyre, the resultingcharacter rather than the originating cause of this moral fragmentation ismoral individualism – the ascription of complete moral autonomy to themind and/or conscience of the individual, and the relegation of the prop-erly political to the social coordination of felt desires (what economists call“preferences”) and the conflicting opinions of self-contained individuals.So deep is its impoverishment that liberal individualism goes as far

as to make a positive virtue out of this conception of moral and politicallife. In other words, it represents individual autonomy and the politics ofpublic choice as the consummation of humankind’s search for freedom andenlightenment. But in fact, or soMacIntyre contends, the reality is that suchautonomy amounts to a moral vacuum, a condition in which the legislativesovereignty of individual moral agents means that the crucial distinctionbetween “good” and “believed to be good” disappears. In this way modern


“morality” is deprived of any rational foundation, as knowledge would beif there were no distinction between “true” and “believed to be true.” Inshort, there is nothing upon which our beliefs about “the good” can bebased. The whole system of ideas rests upon a radical distinction between“fact” and “value” whose implication is that, in contrast to the realm ofreal “facts” and rational “means,” there is nothing to temper the wildestflights of the moral imagination. Indeed, precisely because this is so, the“democratized self has no necessary social content and no necessary socialidentity, [and] can then be anything, can assume any role or take any pointof view, because it is in and for itself nothing” (After Virtue, p. 32).However, and more important yet for present purposes, despite its

vacuity modern “morality” is not without its articulation, its accompanyingphilosophy. One version of this is to be found in the existentialism of Sartre,another in the sociology of Erving Goffman. But both are, upon analysis,essentially varieties of emotivism. It is in the widespread contemporarysubscription to emotivism – “the doctrine that all evaluative judgmentsare nothing but expressions of preferences, expressions of attitude orfeeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character” (After Virtue,pp. 11–12) – that we find the distillation of our modern malaise. Accordingto emotivism the function of moral terms is not to describe the things andpeople they are employed to evaluate, but rather to express and evincethe subjective feelings of approval and disapproval that are prompted bythose things. On this account moral judgments are criterionless; any oneis as good (or as bad) as any other. But if so, then the much vaunted moralfreedom of the individual is not so much freedom as emptiness; in thelanguage of John Locke, license has replaced liberty. Since we can assertand affirm what we will, there is no point in asserting this rather than that,and hence no point in asserting anything at all.One further feature of emotivism must be recorded before its peculiar,

and defective, character is properly understood.

A moral philosophy – and emotivism is no exception – characteristicallypresupposes a sociology. For every moral philosophy offers explicitly orimplicitly at least a partial conceptual analysis of the relationship of anagent to his or her reasons, motives, intentions and actions, and in so doinggenerally presupposes some claim that these concepts are embodied or atleast can be in the real social world. . . .Thus it would generally be a decisiverefutation of a moral philosophy to show that moral agency on its ownaccount of the matter could never be socially embodied; and it also followsthat we have not yet fully understood the claims of any moral philosophy

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until we have spelled out what its social embodiment would be. . . . [B]utat least since Moore the dominant narrow conception of moral philosophyhas ensured that the moral philosophers could ignore this task; as notablydo the philosophical proponents of emotivism. (After Virtue, p. 23)

In brief, modern morality is a fragmentary residue of the moral worldthat preceded it, and if it appears to accord with, even be endorsed by, philo-sophical emotivism, this is only because emotivism has singularly failed toseek, let alone engage with, the historical-cum-sociological understandingthat any adequate moral philosophy requires.This is, I think, a reasonably accurate account of the picture MacIntyre

paints in the first three chapters of After Virtue. Yet, as I shall suggest, it isone not wholly in accord with what follows in the remainder of the book.Understanding the element of dissonance, in fact, gives us an importantinsight into the real relation that MacIntyre sees between history and phi-losophy, and reveals the internal dialectic that continues to work itself outin subsequent volumes.Let us return to the analogy with science. The imaginary hypothesis

is that at some point in the past a social and political catastrophe befellthe activity of science, such that those who later attempted to recover theelements of scientific understanding were destined to fail, and at the sametime were unable to know of their failure. The new generation of would-be scientists is in “a world in which the language of natural science . . .

continues to be used but is in a grave state of disorder.” Furthermore, “if inthis imaginary world analytical philosophy were to flourish, it would neverreveal the fact of this disorder. For the techniques of analytical philosophyare essentially descriptive of the language of the present.”This imaginary story of the state of science is unquestionably com-

pelling, but it is not altogether easy to see how the analogy is to be appliedto contemporary morality. Nor is it easy to see quite how it fits with whatMacIntyre says about emotivism. To begin with we may reasonably ask:What are the moral equivalents of widespread riots, factories being burneddown, books destroyed, physicists lynched? What is the counterpart to theKnow-Nothing political movement? And when did all this happen? Andwhere?If MacIntyre is right, the present state of morality and the present state

of moral philosophy can only be understood by an appeal to history. Hehas much more to say about this history, a topic to be returned to shortly.But in subsequent pages he records no social and political episodes of thetype that mark his imaginary history of science and that have hitherto gone


unnoticed. Of course, it is only an analogy, but the observation of thisdissimilarity, as it seems to me, is not altogether idle. Are we to supposethat there has been a moral catastrophe of equally striking proportions, ornot? And if there has been, by what events has it beenmarked?However, forpresent purposes the importance of making this observation lies rather inits highlighting of this fact: MacIntyre’s general conception is one in whichhistorical investigation uncovers philosophical inadequacy; the scientificanalogy for its part suggests that the history in question is, so to speak,a material one, one of riots, lynchings, political movements and so on.Indeed, on the strength of this analogy, it would not be whollymistaken, butindeed quite understandable, to construeMacIntyre’s account of emotivismand (following the last quotation) analytical philosophy more broadly assomething like the Marxist account of ideology: Such philosophy reflectsand confirms the self-images of the age, but cannot reveal their deficiencies,however critical its own self-image may be.

The derivation of political, juridical and ideological notions . . . is a processaccomplished by the so-called thinker consciously indeed, but with a falseconsciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown tohim, otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. (Marx andEngels 1968, p. 690)

So writes Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels, and underlying his ac-count of ideology is an unquestionably materialist conception of history.The CommunistManifesto (authored by bothMarx andEngels), commentingon the idea that the intellectual activities of the philosopheswere an importantcontributory factor in the French revolution of 1789, says:

German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprit, eagerlyseized on this literature, only forgetting that when these writings immi-grated from France into Germany, French social conditions had not im-migrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions, thisFrench literature lost all its immediate practical significance, and assumeda purely literary aspect. (Marx and Engels 1968, p. 56)

An alternative to this materialist explanation is to be found in the ide-alist one, which explains social and political conditions, their rise and fall,success and failure, in terms of the ideas that they embody. One expo-nent of such a contention is Michael Oakeshott, a philosopher who sharesmany of Collingwood’s sympathies and is generally regarded as perhaps thelast of the British Idealists. Oakeshott, in sharp contrast toMarx andEngels’materialism, explains our contemporary moral and political culture as the

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outcome of an erroneous, and hence destructive, philosophy, a philosophyhe calls rationalism.

Moral ideals are a sediment; they have the significance they do only solong as they are suspended in a religious or social tradition, so long as theybelong to a religious or social life. The predicament of our time is that theRationalists have been at work so long on their project of drawing off theliquid in which our moral ideals were suspended (and pouring it away asworthless) that we are left only with the dry and gritty residue which chokesus as we try to take it down. (Oakeshott 1962, p. 36)

The first of these sentences expresses a view strikingly like MacIntyre’s,but the explanation of our “predicament” that follows clearly lays the blameat the feet of a philosophy, the philosophy of rationalism. So too we mightthink MacIntyre’s thesis idealist. In support of this interpretation it canbe noted, first, that several remarks in After Virtue seem to suggest thatit is the widespread belief in emotivism which has generated much of thedifficulty. This is because the “characters” that populate ourmodern drama,and which together make up the social possibilities around which our livesare structured, are the moral representatives of our culture.More than that,they are said to be the social embodiment of “moral and metaphysical ideasand theories” (After Virtue, p. 28), of which emotivism is chief. Secondly,what follows the “disquieting suggestion” and the analysis of emotivismis not material history so much as the history of ideas, and the history ofphilosophy in particular.How can this be?Why is it not, as the analogy would suggest, a history of

riots and lynchings? In large part the answer is that the materialist/idealistdistinction is just the sort of dichotomy that MacIntyre aims to overcomewith his fusion of history and philosophy. Chapter 4 of After Virtue begins:“What I am going to suggest is that the key episodes in the social historywhich transformed, fragmented and, if my extreme view is correct, largelydisplaced morality . . . were episodes in the history of philosophy” (AfterVirtue, p. 37).Immediately a question arises: are we to suppose that philosophy has

determined the course of social history?MacIntyre is alive to, and addresses,the problem at once. Chapter 4 continues:

[H]ow can this be so? In our own culture academic philosophy is a highlymarginalized and specialized activity. . . .Professors of philosophy . . .wouldfind it surprising, and the larger public even more surprising, if it weresuggested, as I am now suggesting, that the roots of some of the problems


which now engage the specialized attention of academic philosophers andthe roots of someof the problems central to our everyday social and practicallives are one and the same. . . . Yet this might become less implausible if thethesis were cast in historical form. For the claim is that both our generalculture and our academic philosophy are in central part the offspring of aculture in which philosophy did constitute a central form of social activity.(After Virtue, p. 37)

The need to show this is evident, to my mind. Anyone who wishes toestablish that the history of philosophy is also a history of social eventsmust give an account of how the two are interconnected, and the most ob-vious way of doing so is to show that the activity of philosophizing has atsome point had the sort of social significance that politics and commerceare thought to have in the contemporary world. Can this be done? Thisbrings us to the second of the three contentions I identified at the start, thatphilosophical inquiry and the exploration of ideas can affect the way socialhistory goes. In the subsequent chapters of After Virtue we are given ac-counts of a broad sweep of societies from ancient Athens, throughmedievalChristendom, to Enlightenment Europe. But the most focused example ofa society formed and driven by philosophy – namely eighteenth-centuryScotland – is to be found in the next book in MacIntyre’s trilogy. It is tothis “test case” that I now turn.

2. PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY AND SOCIAL ORDER

Was philosophy as an activity ever as important within Western Europeanculture as MacIntyre claims and as his interrelation of history and philos-ophy requires? If it was, how widespread was this phenomenon? Despitetheir evident importance for his thesis, I shall eschew these more generalquestions and ask only whether he makes out the case with respect to justone context and example.This example, of course, is Scotland in the eighteenth century, the pe-

riodof theScottishEnlightenment.RobertWokler has criticizedMacIntyrefor ignoring almost completely what appears to be a far more obvious ex-ample than Scotland, namely the influence on public affairs exercised bythe French philosophes. “How is it possible,” he asks, “that Voltaire – thegodfather of the Enlightenment Project on any plausible interpretation ofits meaning – is altogether missing from MacIntyre’s cast?” (Wokler 1994,p. 116).This rhetorical question can be answered, however. ForMacIntyre’s

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story to work, it is essential not merely that philosophical ideas be in thesocial air, so to speak, but also that, in some way or other, philosophicalthought and reflection be institutionalized. On this point too, Wokler iscritical:

MacIntyre appears to subscribe to the view that only holders of publicpositions, with socially rooted responsibilities, can exercise any real im-pact on their followers. But this is surely absurd. To the extent that theEnlightenment was a critically subversive movement, as MacIntyre por-trays it, its estrangement from the settled institutions of its day, in Franceand elsewhere, enhanced its power. By deliberately excluding a French focusfrom his study, MacIntyre offers his readers an account of peripheries with-out a core. His Enlightenment Project has been shorn of its projectionism.(Wokler 1994, p. 117)

I shall not explore this objection further, partly because I lack the his-torical expertise necessary to do so. Suffice it to say, whatever the truth ofWokler’s contention about philosophy as a socially subversive force, it isevidently important for MacIntyre’s thesis that there be at least some con-texts in which philosophy and philosophers enjoyed an established socialrole of a certain sort. And it is arguable that with respect to the role ofphilosophy within its social institutions, Scotland was striking among theEuropean nations. An impressive case can be made for asserting that inthe time of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, and ThomasReid – in short the period of the Enlightenment – philosophical inquiry andeducation played a distinctive and highly influential part in the cultural lifeof Scotland. The evidence for this case, evidence by which others besidesMacIntyre have been impressed, is worth rehearsing briefly.In the eighteenth century Scotland had five universities (in contrast to

England’s two), one each in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and St. Andrews, andtwo in Aberdeen. All of these followed a common curriculum, thus giv-ing the country a standard ‘university system’ that was relatively rare else-where. Broadly, this common curriculum preserved the oldmedieval coursestructure, once common to Europe, in accordance with which the univer-sities were divided into a “lower” Faculty of Arts and “higher” Facultiesof Divinity, Law, and Medicine. All students first took a four-year coursein the Faculty of Arts comprising the seven traditional subjects, includingcourses in logic and in moral philosophy. After completing the arts course,some then proceeded to a training in law, medicine, or divinity.In reality the picture was not homogenous. The arts curriculum seems

to have been fairly uniform, but medical education in Aberdeen and


St. Andrews, in contrast to Edinburgh for example, was erratic. WhileEdinburgh led the world in anatomy, such that students flocked to it fromacross Europe, elsewhere in Scotland medical degrees could simply bepurchased. The French revolutionary Marat, for example, who had neverbeen to Scotland, possessed a degree in medicine from St. Andrews, andthe English public was regularly warned to be on its guard against themedical graduates of Aberdeen, where, it is relevant to note, one RegiusProfessor of Medicine lectured only once in his twenty-two year tenure ofthe office. Something of the same may be said of law: the “higher” Fac-ulty of Law in Aberdeen did not come into its own until the nineteenthcentury.Nevertheless, by and large it was true of the professional classes, espe-

cially the clergy of the national church, both that they comprised the heartof the social order and that they had a philosophical education. This wasespecially important after the Act of Union of 1707. Thereafter Scotlandhad no Parliament, but it continued to have its own distinctive ecclesias-tical, legal, and educational systems, all of them acting for the most partin independence of the Parliament in London, and all of them staffed byuniversity-trained men. In particular, the General Assembly of the Churchof Scotland was a forum for discussion and decision on social, intellectual,and political matters pertaining to “the Church and Nation of Scotland,”as the constitutional phrase had it. As a result, it is not implausible to claim,as MacIntyre does, that this was a society in which philosophy played astrikingly important role.What was that role exactly? Whose Justice? Which Rationality? devotes

three chapters to this question, the central one expressly entitled “Philoso-phy in the Scottish Social Order.” The general picture MacIntyre paints isthis. The academies of Scotland inherited elements of both Aristotelianismand Augustinianism (in its Calvinist form). Moreover, the legal and socialorder had been hugely influenced by Viscount Stair’s Institutions (a sub-ject to be returned to). This background is instructive when we considerthe conflicts that beset not merely the world of ideas, but the ecclesias-tical and moral world in which Hutcheson (and others) had to teach andoperate. This was a world where the Evangelical party, persuaded of thepreeminence of revealed truth and the corrupted nature of human reason,was ranged against the Moderates. The task of the Moderates was to show,not that revealed truth was irrational or irrelevant (as atheism alleged), butthat the important business of sifting truth from error amongst competingclaims to revelation was the proper business of philosophy. And philosophy,here, should be broadly understood, since the expertise of the philosophers

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frequently incorporated a wide sweep of learning from biblical Hebrew toNewtonian mathematics. MacIntyre quotes with approval the remark ofColin MacLaurin, one of the premier mathematicians of the day:

[N]atural philosophy may become a sure basis to natural religion, but it isvery preposterous to deduce natural philosophy from any hypothesis, ’thoinvented to make us imagine ourselves possest of a more compleate systemof metaphysics, or contrived perhaps with a view to obviate more easilysome difficulties in natural theology. (Quoted inWhose Justice?, p. 250)

In other words, the task of philosophy so conceived is not to displaceor eradicate revealed truth, but to provide its intellectual grounding. Thepoint is that philosophy, and especially moral philosophy, has to be thearbiter between competing theological interpretations of Scripture, andthat, given the importance of these questions in the society of the time, thisarbitration assumes an important social role. Thus it was that the Scottishprofessors of moral philosophy became principal agents in the outcome ofsocial events. This also explains how, at least in this case, “key episodes inthe social history . . . were episodes in the history of philosophy.”There are those who would raise doubts about the historical accuracy

of this story, a very important question if MacIntyre’s fusion of history andphilosophy is to succeed. However, there is an anterior question about theconceptual relations that such a history, even if accurate, can be taken tosustain. The point to be stressed is that for this conception to work it is notenough that philosophers should be shown to have a social role. This initself is compatible with a much more contingent relation than that whichMacIntyre’s account requires. The most profoundly materialist philosophyof history can concede that there have been periods when those designatedphilosophers have exercised considerable influence, just as there have beenperiods when theologians had a marked degree of social pre-eminence, andas, in our own time perhaps, scientists do. What needs to be shown, rather,is that philosophy, (or theology, or science), in itself has been socially influ-ential. And this means, with respect to any of the three, that some demon-stration is required that intellectual adequacy is directly correlated with thecontinuing success of the social institutions which it underwrites. Corre-spondingly, we need to be able to demonstrate that intellectual inadequacyto the condition of the times is the ultimate explanation of social failure.It seems tome thatMacIntyre is stronger on the former relation than on

the latter. He aims to demonstrate, for instance, that Hutcheson’s accountsof justice and practical reason had strengths that served their time well.They also had internal, inherentweaknesses that explain the eventual failure


of certain social institutions and cultural trends. Perhaps. But there is aless elevated idea to consider. However elegant and intellectually sophis-ticated such accounts may have been, it is quite possible that the temperof the times first endorsed them with relatively little understanding, andthen cast them aside in prejudice and ignorance. To do so was irrationalof course, if they really did have the intellectual strengths he alleges, butwould have been no less effective for this irrationality. It is, in my view, anintellectualist prejudice to suppose that only coherent ideas can work, orendure, in the end. Unreason may be as powerful, sometimes more so, thanrationality.Interestingly, much of MacIntyre’s own account of our past both con-

tends for and sustains just this suggestion. In Three Rival Versions he tells usthat his account of

Aquinas’s work as the culmination and integration of the Augustinian andAristotelian traditions is not at all howAquinas was understood bymuch thegreater part of both his contemporaries and his immediate successors . . .

What defeated Aquinas was the power of the institutionalized curriculum.Neither theology nor the subordinate artes liberales could in the middle orlate thirteenth century find room for the Aristotelian system. (Three RivalVersions, p. 51)

The same sort of “defeat of reason” is instanced in his claim that the failureof the Enlightenment Project ushered in an era of liberal individualism that,by his own telling, is both intellectually impoverished and enduring. Thecentral contention of After Virtue, in fact, is that we have a fragmented andincoherent conception of morality, which we have nonetheless succeededin living with for a considerable period of time. MacIntyre’s own analysisof the modern malaise, after all, is that the now dominant language ofhuman rights and individual freedom, which together comprise the mostevident product of this conception, are omnipresent, and form the stapleof contemporary political language.To acknowledge their dominance and durability, of course, is not to

assert their intellectual adequacy. On the contrary, the most compelling(if not in the end convincing) aspect of MacIntyre’s analysis is preciselyits implication that we live in an intellectually fractured world. But we dolive in it. If this were not so, his account of post-Enlightenment modernitywould lose most of its interest; if the errors of modernity were idle, theiranalysis would not take the powerful form of social criticism.Now if all this is true, what it implies is that intellectual failure does not,

in and of itself, spell social disintegration; and this in its turn implies that the

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explanation of social forms – their emergence or their continuance – is notalways to be explained in terms of the philosophical adequacy and inad-equacy of the ideas that underwrite them. Pace Hegel (and several com-mentators have found a strongly, if unexplicitly, Hegelian element perme-atingMacIntyre’s philosophical history) the real is not always rational.Whyshould it not have been the case that the intellectually better side was de-feated by social tendencies of an irrational kind, or even by political forcemajeure? We know from the experience of both tyrannies and democra-cies that reason does not always prevail. Indeed, this seems to be preciselyMacIntyre’s story. Modern liberalism is intellectually flawed. Yet it persists,and it is precisely its persistence that generates themodern perplexities withwhich he is concerned.Applying this general thought to the particular case of the Scottish

Enlightenment seems a simple matter. Even if Hutcheson’s account of jus-tice hadbeen intellectually stillmore robust thanMacIntyre alleges, itmightyet have been swept aside. And so, it seems, he says it was. Hutcheson’s ar-ticulation and heroic defense of Scottish philosophy, and its role in theexplication of law and theology, could not in the end withstand the acidsof “Hume’s Anglicizing Subversion” (the title of a third important chap-ter inWhose Justice? Which Rationality?). MacIntyre represents the contestbetween the Evangelical and Moderate parties in a way which suggests(though it does not actually demonstrate) that the former lost because ofits intellectual inadequacy. But in the next part of his story he alleges thatthe victory of the Moderates was itself short-lived.The explanation of both its temporary success and subsequent fail-

ure, however, is an interesting and important topic in its own right. TheEvangelicals were deeply suspicious of human reason; therein lay theirweakness. Hutcheson by contrast was a proponent of reason; therein layhis strength. But he was not a Rationalist of Platonic stripe. That is to say,Hutcheson’s thinking, at least onMacIntyre’s interpretation, did not appealto an abstract conception of universal Reason, but drew upon a theologicaland philosophical tradition of inquiry whose strength lay in its ability torecognize challenges both from within and from beyond its own concep-tions. It could thus seek, not merely to address them, but to answer themby drawing upon its own resources. This gave it a certain resilience. Butmore significantly, it allowed it to deploy reason in the service of personaland social formation.It is this notion of a tradition that comes to be of central importance,

not only to this particular episode in the history of ideas, but toMacIntyre’swhole project. Tradition is a subject that figures ever more prominently in


the succeeding volumes of MacIntyre’s work, and especially in Three RivalVersions of Moral Enquiry.Once again, there are reasons to doubt the historical accuracy of this

portrayal of Hutcheson. Wokler, for one, questions its veracity.

Hutcheson was to take up his appointment not as a conservative adherentof a Scottish tradition of higher education but as a critically vigorouslycritical reformer. His widely attested popularity as a lecturer in Glasgow,partly due to his casual style of delivery in English rather than by way ofLatin readings, was even more attributable to the zealotry of his preachinga joyously uplifting moral philosophy in accordance with benign natureand providence, that contrasted with the gloomy precepts around originalsin of Augustinian Scholasticism. The Scottish theological tradition whichMacIntyre claimsHutcheson affirmedwas actually rejected byhim. (Wokler1994, p. 119)

Perhaps, though, there is a deeper story to be told than Wokler hereallows, and certainly the context MacIntyre supplies for his interpreta-tion of Hutcheson suggests one. We should not single out AugustinianScholasticism as the sole or even dominant element in the Scottish intellec-tual tradition. There were other influential strands. It is at this point thatthere is occasion to return to Stair’s Institutions of the Law of Scotland (1681).MacIntyre draws a contrast between the Institutions and the Commentarieson the Laws of England (1765) by William Blackstone. Though the secondappeared considerably later than the first, the comparison provides the vitalclue to understanding the later conflict between Hutcheson and Hume.

What Stair’s Institutions provided was a comprehensive statement of the na-ture of justice, of law, and of rational and right conduct, which articulatedthe presuppositions of what were to be distinctively Scottish attitudes. Noone in the Scottish eighteenth century could engage with these topics with-out in one way or another confronting Stair’s theoretical and conceptualscheme, a scheme which expressed in terms of the law of Scotland not onlythe legal but the key theological and philosophical doctrines concerningjustice, law, and rational and right conduct. (Whose Justice?, pp. 226–227)

It is instructive to contrast Stair’smethodof argumentwith thatwhichwas tobe followed a good deal later in England by SirWilliam Blackstone. . . . [I]nin the early sections of the Commentaries . . . Blackstone begins by writing asif he too is going to deduce the first principles of the law from theological ormetaphysical doctrine. But he at once declares such an appeal redundant bydeclaring of God that “he has been pleased so to contrive the constitution

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and frame of humanity, that should we want no other prompter to inquireafter and pursue the rule of right, but only our own self-love, that universalprinciple of action . . .hehas not perplexed the lawof naturewith amultitudeof abstracted rules and precepts . . . but has graciously reduced the rule ofobedience to this one paternal precept ‘that man should pursue his own trueand substantial happiness.’ ” (Whose Justice?, pp. 228–229)

The contrast is plain. Whereas Stair seeks a metaphysical basis to law,rooted in the apprehension of fundamental principles, Blackstone finds abasis for law in the need to coordinate the pursuit of individual desires(the same sort of picture we find in Hobbes, of course). As a result, thesealternative conceptions of law both reflect and to a degree strengthen thewell-known differences between English and Scots law. While the formeris in a sense empirical, since everything turns on case law and precedent, thelatter is a descendent of Roman or civilian law, in which cases are decidedaccording to principle and precept.This difference exists beyond the level of legal theory: it reflects a wider

philosophical difference about the relation between reason and passionwith respect to action and deliberation. Moreover, it is one that receivesexplicit expression in the philosophical debates of the Scottish Enlight-enment. Whereas Hume, of the Blackstone Anglicizing tendency, assertsthat “morality is more properly felt than judged of” (Treatise III, Pt.1, §ii),Thomas Reid, the true inheritor of Hutcheson and the Scottish tradition ofphilosophy, argues precisely the opposite, that “the excercise of my moralfaculty . . . are acts of judgement, and not feeling” (Essays on the Active PowersV, VII).In short, Hutcheson, in the spirit of Stair, retains a sense that the role

of moral philosophy (and hence social theory) is to discover, or perhapsdisclose, rational principles that will form and guide desire. Hume, in thespirit of Blackstone, sees the task of moral philosophy as that of recordingthe operation of the passions, and correspondingly, his political and socialthought is of an instrumental (ultimately utilitarian) kind that accommo-dates rather than influences the passions.By MacIntyre’s account the difference is of huge significance, and ush-

ers in, eventually, the emotivist impoverishment of moral language andthought. If this is indeed an impoverishment, how are we to recover thegroundwehave lost?The answer cannot liewith theEnlightenment Projectof universal reason, a project which had to fail. Rather we must articulate,recapture, and revitalize the idea of an intellectual tradition that Hutchesondeployed. And here we find a third version of the integration of history and


philosophy that is a recurrent theme in MacIntyre’s work with which thischapter is concerned.

3. THE IDEA OF AN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION

It is in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry that the idea of an intellectualtradition comes to greatest prominence. The rival versions of inquiry con-trasted are those of the encyclopaedist, the genealogist, and the traditional-ist. The first of these is that of the Enlightenment project, still alive and (soto speak) well in the nineteenth century. This conception of rational inquiryunderstands the pursuit of truth and the acquisition of knowledge accordingto the model of compiling an encyclopaedia. It is the conception – embod-ied, in fact, in theEncyclopaedia Britannica – that the pursuit of understandingconsists in the timeless, yet progressive accumulation of information. By theconsistent application of methods of a sort that must commend themselvesto any rational inquirer, humankind has gradually amassed more and moreof the truth. Science is unified; its aim and purpose is the steady expansionof knowledge. The picture is something like the regular amassing of coinsin a treasury. We are better off the more we have.The dysanalogy, of course, is that we are not told what to spend them

on. What is the point of knowledge acquisition? In this encyclopaedist con-ception, science and understanding are on a par with the filling of the trainspotter’s notebook.What ismissing is context, a context of aim and purpose.In short, the encyclopaedist’s conception is ahistorical.By contrast, the genealogical conception (MacIntyre takes Nietzsche

as its representative protagonist) is acutely aware of historical context, andsees the timeless accumulation of truth as an impossible ideal. Truth andunderstanding are relative to historical period and social purpose. But pre-cisely because he sets scientific endeavor so firmly in the sphere of sociallife, the genealogist comes to see intellectual endeavor as an exercise ofpower in defense of interests; its self-professed character as the impartialpursuit of knowledge is a mask, nothing better, in fact, than an amalgam ofdistortion and illusion that moral thinkers, such as Nietzsche, can at bestwork to dispel. The genealogist, in other words, subordinates philosophy inhistory. Because he sees, rightly, that total historical detachment, or radicaluniversalism, is impossible, he swings violently in the opposite directionand concludes that every thought and idea is the creature, and hence theinstrument, of its time, to be used or abused in the power struggles of socialand political history.

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Whereas the encyclopaedist is unrealistically ahistorical, the genealo-gist is an historical relativist. In contrast to both positions there is a thirdpossibility to be described – that of the traditionalist. Traditionalists – thosewho self-consciously work within an historical tradition of inquiry – see thepursuit of understanding as amatter notmerely of acquiring items of knowl-edge but of pursuing intellectual questions and problems that they have notinvented but inherited. This notion of intellectual inheritance raises the in-dividual inquirer above the peculiarities of his or her own time, but withoutremoving the whole enterprise into the impossible realm of the timeless. Itthus implies that “science,” broadly conceived, requires membership in atradition – a movement of thought from and through history. Accordingly,acceptance of this inheritance implies that a large part of the pursuit ofunderstanding is exploration of coherent self-understanding, discoveringwhat we know by grasping who we are.For the genealogist there is no truth as traditional epistemology under-

stands it; for the encyclopaedist truth is external to the method of inquiry.On both conceptions it is possible to specify the end of intellectual endeavorindependently of its methods, and possible therefore to ask, irrespectiveof the content of those ends, whether the methods are effective. Hume’sAnglicizing tendency, following the generalized model of Blackstone’s ap-proach to the law, understands the end to be set by passion and desire, andaccordingly the efficacy of the method to be determined by preference sat-isfaction. Hence the resultant emotivism, and the subservience of reasonto desire; what point could reason have other than to be the slave of thepassions?MacIntyre has, let us agree, made the inadequacy of this position plain.

But in addition there is something positive to be said for the traditionalistaccount that he wishes to endorse in its place: it simply is more accuratewith respect to the realities of intellectual endeavour. In doing philosophyor sciencewe do not, as amatter of fact, invent the problems or questions weaddress. On the contrary, we learn what they are, just as we learn proposedsolutions to them.Thosewho fail to do so, who simply open the encyclopae-dia, have neither point nor purpose to guide them, and thus no guard againstthe wild and fanciful use of the facts they come to possess. They are deludedinto supposing that they, uniquely and for the first time, might uncover the“key to all mythologies” (the fruitless pursuit of Mr. Casaubon in GeorgeEliot’sMiddlemarch). On the other hand, it seems perverse to insist, as thegenealogist does, that there is really no such thing as inquiry at all, andthat those who think there is are the perpetual victims of self-deception


and/or manipulation by others. A more accurate description seems to bethat, though inquiry cannot “leap over Rhodes” (to quote Hegel), nor is itirrevocably at the mercy of contemporaneous powers and passions.But if for these reasons we do adopt the traditionalist point of view,

then ends and means cannot be specified independently in the way theHumean encyclopaedist required because those things we might identify asthe means of achieving the ends at which the tradition aims are necessarilyembedded in states of character which are themselves constitutive of theends – states of character that a large part of education exists to create.Whereas the Humean deliberator, believing that reason is the slave of thepassions, asks of the educator “tell me what I want to know,” the properrequest is “improve my understanding,” tell me, in other words, what Iought to want to know.Accordingly, intelligent inquirers seek, pace the genealogist, to pass be-

yond the immediate and the ephemeral, but they do not expect thereby tobe offered (as the encyclopaedist offers them) an accumulation of “facts”with which to fill up the vacuity of their minds, or a set of algorithms bywhich they may generate more mind-filling facts for themselves. Rather,they seek guidance on how to think, and what to think about. What thisimplies is that the central source of legitimation and justification in a tradi-tion of inquiry is neither the end result – truth – nor principles of inquiry –Cartesian-type rules for the direction of the mind – but the authoritativepractitioner, the one who has mastered the tradition.So far we have been concerned with intellectual inquiry and with rival

conceptions of it. The central point to grasp, however, is that intellectualinquiry is a practice, and the same possibilities of conception, and the samepoints for and against them, can bemadewith respect to all humanpractices.InThree Rival VersionsMacIntyre describes the character of the authoritativepractitioner in a way that includes, but is not restricted to, the person whois a master of philosophy or science.

The authority of a master is both more and other than a matter of exem-plifying the best standards so far. It is also and most importantly a matterof knowing how to go further and especially how to direct others towardsgoing further, using what can be learned from the tradition afforded by thepast to move towards the telos of fully perfected work. It is thus in knowinghow to link past and future that those with authority are able to draw upontradition, to interpret and reinterpret it, so that its directedness towards thetelos of that particular craft becomes apparent in new and characteristically

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unexpected ways. And it is the ability to teach others how to learn this typeof knowing how that the power of the master within the community of acraft is legitimated as rational authority. (Three Rival Versions, pp. 65–66)

History is concernedwith what has been. Philosophy is a normative inquiry,concerned with what, rationally, we ought to think and believe. It is nowpossible to see how, on this third account of the connection, tradition fuseshistorical understanding and normative judgment.

Because at any particular moment the rationality of a craft is justified byits history so far, which has made it what it is in that specific time, place,and set of historical circumstances, such rationality is inseparable from thetradition through which it was achieved. To share in the rationality of a craftrequires sharing in the contingencies of its history, understanding its storyas one’s own, and finding a place for oneself as a character in the enacteddramatic narrative which is that story so far. (Three Rival Versions, p. 65)

If we apply this line of thought to moral reasoning, we can readilysee how different it looks once we begin to think in terms of tradition.Determining the right course of action will not now be a matter of applyingabstract principles of practical rationality (Descartes or Kant), or estimatinglikely consequences for happiness (Bentham orMill), or exposing the forceswhich,whilemasquerading as deliverances of truth and rationality, are reallydevices to suppress the exercise of individual will (Nietzsche or Foucault).Rather, practical reason will be a matter of relying upon the judgments ofthose well versed in the moral traditions of specific times and places, andby emulation coming to be able to make judgments in our turn. We areaccustomed to defining the morally good agent as one who performs rightactions; on this way of thinking, the morally right act is to be defined asthat which would be performed by the good agent.The Aristotelian character of this line of thought is evident. Yet

MacIntyre has expressly denied that his aim is to restore a “morality ofthe virtues” in preference to a “morality of rules.” The difference is to befound in the last sentence of the passage just quoted, for his account goesbeyond Aristotelianism precisely in its appeal to history. The master of atradition, including a tradition of rational moral inquiry, must find a place“as a character in the enacted dramatic narrative which is that story so far.”To do so, obviously, requires a knowledge of what that story is, in short aknowledge of history.If this third account of the fusion of history and philosophy is to succeed

two conditions need to be met. First, understanding must be essentially


historical. Second, with respect to philosophy (and moral philosophy inparticular), this historicity must not jeopardize its normative character. Canthese conditions be secured?Satisfying the first of them would appear problematic. It seems to be

the case that participation in a tradition could be wholly lacking in his-torical consciousness. Future craftsmen must be inducted into the craft bya master, and thereby have their judgments informed by previous (whichis to say historical) experience reflected upon. But why must the form ofthis reflection be itself expressly historical? The origins of the craft, or ofa specific project, the names and contribution of predecessors, and indeedthe historical development of the craft itself could be quite unknown to acontemporary master. He or she is required only to be imbued with thetradition, not to be able to articulate its history. Arguably, this was preciselythe case with the engineers, architects, and stonemasons who contributed tothe building of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe. They were mastersof a craft engaged in an inherited project with its special telos, one whichthey in their turn sought to bring to fulfillment and perfection. But it seemsreasonable to suppose that they did so without any formulable knowledgeor understanding of the past. In a few cases their originating predecessorsare identifiable (Canterbury), but not necessarily known to them. If not,were their endeavors any the less consequential?It is open to MacIntyre to reply, I think, that whatever may be true

of other practices, such ahistorical understanding of a moral tradition ora tradition of inquiry is impossible, since these crucially employ concepts,and the use of concepts implies conscious reflection upon a cultural realityand historical legacy, chiefly that of one’s language.

Every tradition is embodied in some particular set of utterances and actionsand thereby in all the particularities of some specific language and culture.The invention, elaboration, andmodificationof the concepts throughwhichboth those who found and those who inherit a tradition understand it areinescapably concepts which have been framed in one language rather thananother. . . .The conception of language presupposed in saying this is that of a

language as it is used in and by a particular community living at a particulartime and place with particular shared beliefs, institutions and practices.(Whose Justice?, pp. 371–373)

It is this view of language that lies at the heart of MacIntyre’s criti-cism not only of emotivist theories of ethics but of the ahistorical semanticsthat has dominated philosophy in general, and philosophy of language in

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particular, over the last few decades. To understand language is to under-stand a language in a sociohistorical context. Each tradition of inquiry mustemploy such a language and hence this context is a condition of the tra-dition’s existence. For this reason the understanding of that tradition, bypractitioners themselves as much as by inquirers from other traditions, hasto be reflectively historical.I still think there is a difficulty here. It is true that some practices

can be inarticulate in a way that others cannot. Nevertheless, while theunderstanding of language that ordinary language speakers have is indeedan understanding of a specific language, socially embedded and with itsown history, this does not mean that that understanding is itself historical.I should say, in fact, that it only very rarely is. In other words, speakers of alanguage successfully use concepts with a history, but they do not generally,and do not need to, know that history. In the absence of such knowledge,their mastery of the concepts seems largely unaffected.Of course, it is plausible to hold that the position is different with respect

to the philosophical use of that language, which must be reflective in waysthat other uses are not. However, to respond in this way to the difficultythat I think I detect is simply to raise another. It seems that there can be aphilosophical use of language that is not historically informed. Indeed thatis the very point upon which MacIntyre criticizes emotivism, and contem-porary analytical philosophy of language more broadly; these are engage-ments in philosophy, after all, whatever else is to be said about (or against)them.Now someone persuaded of the story so far is unlikely to be persuaded

to the contrary by this reference to the mere possibility of an ahistoricalphilosophical use of and reflection upon language. Such a reference doesnot seem persuasive precisely because the whole point is that it is inadequate.This removes the discussion to another level. I remarked that philosophy isessentially normative, and that any fusion with history (of the sort at whichMacIntyre aims) must preserve this normativity. To declare emotivism in-adequate is to make a normative philosophical judgment. How does theappeal to history sustain or underwrite it?The answer given by this third strand in MacIntyre’s project is plain:

normative philosophical judgments must themselves be rooted in, and de-rived from, a tradition of inquiry that has its own history. The question thenbecomes: which tradition of inquiry are we to draw upon in making thesejudgments?Can there be more than one tradition of inquiry? The answer seems

evident, of course there can. Moreover, the liberal/emotivist conception,


and with it the encyclopaedist, is just one such tradition. To appeal to it,therefore, would seem to endorse the position MacIntyre declares to beinadequate. If its inadequacy is to be revealed, accordingly it must be someother tradition that is appealed to, and evidently MacIntyre means this tobe the neo-Thomist one. But the attempt to do so raises an even moreimportant difficulty. Can a different, more subtle form of relativism beavoided, one in which emotivism is inadequate relative only to one traditionof inquiry?This is a question John Haldane expressly raised in his essay

“MacIntyre’s Thomist Revival:WhatNext?” In a section of the essay signif-icantly entitled “Suspicions of Relativism,” Haldane quotes the followingpassage fromWhose Justice? Which Rationality?.

[W]e must first return to the situation of the person to whom, after all, thisbook is primarily addressed, someone who, not as yet having given theirallegiance to some coherent tradition of enquiry, is besieged by disputesover what is just and about how it is reasonable to act, both at the levelof particular immediate issues . . . and at the level at which rival systematictradition-informed conceptions contend. (Whose Justice?, p. 393)

Haldane then comments:

[I]t is worth dwelling on the situation envisaged in the quoted passage.Here we are to imagine someone who has not yet subscribed to ‘a coherenttradition of enquiry’. That immediately raises the question of how sucha person can choose between rival suitors for his or her mind and con-science. It would seem that his or her choice must be rooted in reason orelse be non-rational. But the former is excluded if rational norms are onlyavailable to a participant within a coherent tradition, for, ex hypothesi, theaddressee is a complete outsider. . . . We are prohibited from saying thatthe rootless addressee can choose on the basis of transcendent norms ofpractical reason, so that excludes a realist resolution. This returns us to thethought that all choosing is from within a tradition, but if so there is noth-ing that is to be said by or to such a person, and a fortiori he cannot make arational choice. (Haldane 1994, pp. 96–97)

In Three Rival VersionsMacIntyre expounds and defends the superiorityof the Thomist tradition of inquiry, but if Haldane is right this will nothelp. To those within it, of course, it comes up with the right answers.To those whose allegiance lies with some other tradition, its answers willbe deemed to be mistaken. But to anyone who stands outside these, andoutside any such tradition, the answers will be rationally unassessable, even

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unintelligible perhaps. Haldane is unduly modest in entitling this sectionof his essay “Suspicions of Relativism”; it seems, rather, that he has shownMacIntyre to be a relativist.Now it needs to be observed that MacIntyre anticipates this criticism

inWhose Justice? Which Rationality?, where he writes as follows:

It is not . . . that competing traditions do not share some standards. All thetraditions with which we have been concerned agree in according a certainauthority to logic both in their theory and in their practice. Were it not sotheir adherents would be unable to disagree in the way that they do. Butthat upon which they agree is insufficient to resolve those disagreements. Itmay therefore seem to be the case that we are confronted with the rival andcompeting claimsof a number of traditions to our allegiance in respect of ourunderstanding of practical rationality and justice, among which we can haveno good reason to decide in favor of any one rather than of the others. . . .Argument along these lines has been adduced in support of a conclusion

that if the only available standards of rationality are those made availableby and within traditions, then no issue between contending traditions isrationally decidable. To assert or to conclude this rather than that can berational relative to the standards of some particular tradition, but not ra-tional as such. There can be no rationality as such. . . . Let us call this therelativist challenge. (Whose Justice?, pp. 351–352)

In the same place MacIntyre outlines a response to this challenge, onewhich he elaborates at greater length elsewhere (MacIntyre 1994c). Itsbasic thrust is that inter-traditional conflicts can in a sense be transcended.This transcendence is not Hegelian – one that, instead of seeing traditionsof inquiry as having distinct and distinguishing histories regards themas moments in the unfolding of human understanding across time, suchthat earlier ones are aufgehoben or taken up in those that succeed them,only to be aufgehoben by others in their turn. Though this picture fitsMacIntyre’s account of the emergence of Thomism rather well (for byhis account Thomism takes up the rival traditions of Augustinianism andAristotelianism in a way that produces a new synthesis), here, it seems,the process stops. The resultant Thomism not only stands in oppositionto the tradition generated by the Enlightenment Project, as it should inaccordance with the Hegelian dialectic, but it does so in perpetuity. Inany case, MacIntyre has expressly said (in a reply to critics) that he is“irremediably anti-Hegelian in rejecting the notion of an absolute stand-point, independent of the particularity of all traditions” (MacIntyre 1994f,p. 295).


If we cannot transcend differences between traditions by employing anHegelian-type absolute standpoint, an alternative would be to find somehitherto undiscovered common ground. Arguably this is what Rawls at-tempts with his concept of an “overlapping consensus” (Rawls 1993, p. 39).It is also the strategy invoked by ethologists and sociobiologists, whose the-orizing may reasonably be interpreted as modern versions of Aristoteliannaturalism. The conflict between traditions, and the place of the inquirerinnocent of traditional loyalties (around whose possibility Haldane raiseshis objection), is to be explained in terms of an underlying common naturethat all human beings share in virtue of their evolved animality and thecondition in which they find themselves.Once again, though, this appears not to be the line MacIntyre wishes

to take. In a 1994 essay (MacIntyre 1994c) he argues that all traditionsof inquiry are committed to an assertion-transcendent concept of truth,committed to holding that “the account of morality which they give doesnot itself, at least in its central contentions, suffer from the limitations,partialities and one-sidedness of a merely local point of view” (MacIntyre1994c, p. 12) and that this shared commitment implies further that

if the scheme and mode of justification to which . . . appeal [is made] tosupport [an] account of the moral life were to turn out to be . . . incapableof providing the resources for exhibiting its argumentative superiority . . .

then it must be capable of being replaced by some scheme and mode ofjustification which does possess the resources both for providing adequaterational support for [its] account and for exhibiting its rational superiorityto any scheme andmode of justification which supports conclusions incom-patible with central theses of that account. For otherwise no claim to truthcould be sustained. (MacIntyre 1994c, p. 12; emphasis in original)

In other words, rational superiority is to be found in the circumstancesin which one tradition explains the persistent difficulties encountered byanother better than the other can itself, and in ways that the adherentsof the less successful tradition can recognize. Applied to moral thinking,this means that if natural law theory (for example) can explain why socialcontract theory encounters the problems it does better than social contracttheory does, but in terms intelligible to social contract theorists, then it canbe declared rationally superior.The example of natural law versus social contract is mine, since

MacIntyre replies to the relativist challenge in exclusively general terms.Yet to make good the abstract claim and produce some result with respectto the real clash of actual traditions, specific cases have to be explored.

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Somewhat curiously, it seems to me, when MacIntyre turns (in his mostrecent book) to address substantial moral issues, he appears to adopt thesecond – naturalistic – strategy rather than the third I have just been de-scribing. Though, as I observed,MacIntyre earlier expressly denied that hisaim was to restore a “morality of the virtues” in preference to a “moralityof rules,” this appears to be precisely the line he takes inDependent RationalAnimals, in which he revives an Aristotelian conception that is entirely silenton any historical dimension and that takes its cue from the vulnerability anddependence that is the mark of human existence per se.What is very striking about this newwork is the difference in orientation

from the three books with which this chapter has been concerned up to thispoint. Even earlier than After Virtue, in fact, in A Short History of Ethics, thebook with which I began,MacIntyre stressed not merely the important, butthe crucial role of history to any adequate moral philosophy. In this newbook, by contrast, there is no discernible historical dimension. The accounthe gives us of human nature and the human condition aims to undergirdmoral philosophy. Indeed his main question is precisely this:

[W]hat difference to moral philosophy would it make, if we were to treatthe facts of vulnerability and affliction and the related facts of dependenceas central to the human condition? (Dependent Rational Animals, p. 4)

The resulting picture, which, we might usefully observe, derives not fromhistorical but from ethological investigation, seems remarkably static, andin fact wholly lacking in the spirit that declared history to be essential tomoral understanding. For my own part I concur with the suggestion (inDependent Rational Animals) that human beings should be regarded as hav-ing a (broadly speaking) biological nature, and that the human condition isone of vulnerability. So much we share with other animals. But an impor-tant point of difference, which is stressed in the trilogy with which I havebeen chiefly concerned, seems to be this: Human beings have a history;other animals do not. How does the conception of an adequate basis formoral philosophy advanced in this book cohere with the strongly historicalconception advanced in After Virtue,Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, andThree Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry?MacIntyre has replied to this question (in correspondence) by saying:

We need to distinguish philosophical work within a tradition that takesthe context supplied by that tradition more or less for granted from workthat appeals explicitly to the narrative history in which it is embedded orwork that defends one tradition and argues for its rational superiority to


some rival. It is just the same in the natural sciences. Someone at work inquantummechanics now is able to work ahistorically, presupposing but notmaking explicit the historical background in Bohr’s model of the atom andthe stages through which that came to be rejected.

In short, the historical dimension is in some sense metaethical, just as thehistory of science is meta-scientific. It is not easy to say, though, whetherthis distinction can really be maintained consistently with at least one of theimportant assertions with which the historical exploration of philosophicalissues began – that “moral concepts change as social life changes.” As itseems to me, it is much more plausible to make this claim with respect tothe concepts of justice and honor (for instance) than with the concepts ofvulnerability and dependence that are invoked in Dependent Rational An-imals. No doubt these concepts have a history, but their moral relevancederives not from this history but from a biological nature that human beingsshare. And insofar as disputed ethical questions can be resolved by the care-ful delineation and deployment of such concepts, to this extent, it seems,we may disregard the interconnection of philosophy and history that hasbeen so central a part of MacIntyre’s enterprise.

2 Tradition in the Recent Work ofAlasdair MacIntyreJ E A N P O R T E R

InAfter Virtue, AlasdairMacIntyre develops a narrative of late modernity inwhich Enlightenment liberalism, attempting to construct a philosophy anda society on the basis of nonteleological reason, falls into intellectual andespecially moral incoherence. The unhappy fate of the modern liberal, leftwith only therapists for comfort and bureaucrats for security, is contrastedwith the happier situation of someone who aspires to a life of virtue in theAristotelian sense.1 Yet it is not clear that this is an option today, giventhat classical and medieval versions of Aristotelian virtue ethics rest on a“metaphysical biology” which is no longer tenable (After Virtue, p. 162).MacIntyre accordingly offers a reformulation of Aristotelian virtue ethicsin which participation in a tradition plays a role analogous to that playedby Aristotle’s metaphysical biology – that is to say, it gives a wider purposeand meaning to the narrative that unifies the individual life.The idea of a tradition continues to play a central role in MacIntyre’s

works. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? he develops a theory of ra-tionality as tradition-guided inquiry, which he offers as an alternative tothe untenable options of Enlightenment foundationalism on the one hand,and postmodern versions of perspectivism and relativism on the otherhand. The project of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is further devel-oped inMacIntyre’s Gifford Lectures, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry:Encyclopaedia, Genealogy and Tradition, in which tradition, as exemplified bythe work of Augustine and Aquinas, is defended over and against its othertwo rivals.Clearly, any study of MacIntyre’s thought must take account of the

central place that he gives to the concept of tradition. Yet this task is com-plicated by the fact that, even though MacIntyre discusses tradition exten-sively, he never defines the term (so far as I have been able to determine),nor does he situate his account of tradition in the context of other recentdiscussions.2 Moreover, as we would expect, MacIntyre’s understanding oftradition evolves over the near decade that elapses between the first edi-tion of After Virtue and the publication of his Gifford lectures. In each of

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Tradition in the Recent Work of Alasdair MacIntyre 39

the three major books that have defined MacIntyre’s mature philosophi-cal program, we find a somewhat different account of what a tradition is.Especially in his later works, MacIntyre moves between a wider conceptof tradition as an overall social and moral orientation, and a more limitedconcept of a tradition as a focused scientific or moral inquiry. Nonetheless,we can arrive at an understanding of MacIntyre’s account of tradition byattending to the ways in which he uses this idea in developing his overallaccount of rationality and morality, and that is the strategy that I will followin this chapter.

1. AFTER VIRTUE: TRADITION AS THE CONTEXT FOR VIRTUE

After Virtue is essentially a critical book.MacIntyre’s aim is first to develop adiagnosis of what he sees as the malaise of contemporary modern thought,and second to provide a sketch of what a suitably reformulated Aristotelianalternative might look like. This point should be emphasized at the outset,because it reminds us that After Virtue is meant to set out a program forfutureworks. As such, it provides a key to understandingwhat comes after it,even though, as we will see, MacIntyre modifies his program in significantways as he develops it. Even more important, it reminds us of a pointon which MacIntyre himself insists, namely, the tentative character andincompleteness of the account of virtue that he develops in the last third ofthe book (After Virtue, p. 271).MacIntyre’s analysis of the failures of modernity is perhaps the best-

known aspect of his work, and only a brief summary is necessary here.3 Inhis view we are in the midst of a catastrophic situation, and all the morecatastrophic because only a few persons are even aware of it. We have lostthe unifying frameworks that are necessary for any coherent moral dis-course; what we have instead are fragments from earlier discourses, whichno longer make sense now that they have been wrenched out of their con-texts, and which can serve only as vehicles for the expression of emotions oras obscuring ideologies for the assertion of power. (That is why, in his view,moral philosophers earlier in the century were so prone to emotivist theo-ries of ethics, and why our contemporaries are so given to the assertion ofautonomy through the language of rights (After Virtue, pp. 6–22, 66–70.))In this respect, our situation contrasts unfavorably with that of antiquityor the middle ages, when moral discourse was given coherence throughideals of virtue, which were complemented through reflection on the rulesnecessary to sustain a moral community. At this point, MacIntyre considers

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Aristotle to be the moral thinker par excellence; yet (as noted above) he alsoclaims that Aristotle’s account of virtue cannot be appropriated as it stands,because it depends on a kind of metaphysical biology that is no longertenable. Nonetheless, Aristotle speaks from within a wider tradition of re-flection on the virtues held together by a core conception of what a virtueis, and MacIntyre does believe that this core conception can be cogentlyreformulated for our own time (After Virtue, p. 186). These convictionsset the agenda for the last part of After Virtue: MacIntyre attempts to setforth the key elements of this concept of virtue, and to sketch out what acontemporary reformulation of that concept might look like.As MacIntyre understands it, the core conception of the virtues that

unifies the tradition of virtue ethics with which he is concerned is built upin three stages:

For there are no less than three stages in the logical development of theconcept which have to be identified in order, if the core conception of avirtue is to be understood, and each of these stages has its own conceptualbackground. The first stage requires a background of what I shall call apractice, the second an account of what I have already characterized as thenarrative order of a single human life and the third an account a good dealfuller than I have given up to nowofwhat constitutes amoral tradition. Eachlater stage presupposes the earlier, but not vice versa. Each earlier stage isboth modified by and reinterpreted in the light of, but also provides anessential constituent of each later stage. The progress in the developmentof the concept is closely related to, although it does not recapitulate in anystraightforward way, the history of the tradition of which it forms the core.(After Virtue, pp. 186–187)4

MacIntyre goes on to define a practice as follows:

By a ‘practice’ I amgoing tomean any coherent and complex formof sociallyestablished cooperative human activity throughwhich goods internal to thatform of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those stan-dards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, thatform of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence,and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematicallyextended. (After Virtue, p. 87)

Hence, what characterizes a practice, in contrast to a skill or technique,is its orientation toward intrinsic goods that can be attained only throughthe practice itself, and that require both skill and sensitivity to the aims ofthe practice in order to be realized. Practices may be found across a wide


range of human activities, including skilled games such as football or chess,complex skills such as architecture or farming, intellectual and scientific in-quiries, and artistic activities such as painting or music (all these examplesare MacIntyre’s own; see After Virtue, pp. 187–188). MacIntyre does notclaim that practices necessarily have intrinsicmoral value, or that the attain-ment of proficiency in any of them is tantamount tomoral virtue. Nonethe-less, practices are significant because they exemplify forms of activity thatare good in themselves, without reference to any further aims toward whichthey might be directed. In order to attain proficiency in a practice, some-one must value, and progressively attain, two kinds of qualities, namely,the goods internal to the practice itself (understood with reference to theindividual as a kind of proficiency in, or a sympathetic understanding of,the internal goods in question), and qualities that are essential to any sortof cooperative activity.Nonetheless, the practices are not themselves virtues, nor are the quali-

ties that they generate in their practitioners necessarily virtues. In respond-ing to misunderstandings on this point generated by the first edition of thebook, MacIntyre carefully notes that a quality cannot be considered to bea virtue unless it meets the conditions specified in two further stages (AfterVirtue, p. 275). Practices provide a conception of a kind of good which isintrinsic and notmerely instrumental, but the qualities intrinsic to one prac-tice may be useless or even harmful in other contexts (although MacIntyrehesitates to admit that a practice might be evil in itself ), and as such, theycannot be considered to be virtues.In order to move toward a conception of virtue, we must move to the

next stage of development, namely, a conception of a human life as a unifiedwhole (After Virtue, p. 205). MacIntyre develops this conception througha reflection on the intelligibility of human actions, which on his view pre-suppose that actions are embedded in an ongoing narrative that gives themmeaning and point (After Virtue, pp. 207–15). This in turn implies that ourlives as a whole are held together by a narrative unity, which is central to theidentity of the subject and forms the precondition for responsibility for one’spast actions (AfterVirtue, pp. 216–218). At the same time, the narrative unityof an individual life is teleological; it presupposes the possibility of evaluat-ing a human life, in terms of its success or failure, as a life well lived or a lifeperverted, frustrated, or wasted. This, in turn, presupposes that human livesare oriented toward a good that transcends the individual, and at this pointwe move to the last stage in the development of the concept of a virtue.For Aristotle, the ideal of human flourishing provides the orienting

good toward which we strive, and provides unity to our individual lives.

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At this stage in the development of his thought, however, MacIntyre doesnot consider this to be a defensible solution today. Nonetheless, he believesthat in order for a human life to find the purpose necessary for its successfulunification, the individual must be oriented toward a good transcendingthe individual. For us, this will take the form of a “narrative quest” forthe good rather than a predetermined aim to be achieved (After Virtue,p. 219). This will necessarily be a communal quest, and as such it willrequire both devotion to a certain kind of good, and the attainment ofqualities necessary to sustain life in community (After Virtue, pp. 219–221).The communal nature of the quest for the good, in turn, implies that ithas a history extending beyond the life of the individual. It is the historicalcharacter of the quest for the good that situates it within a tradition: “Ifind myself part of a history and that is generally to say, whether I like it ornot, whether I recognize it or not, one of the bearers of a tradition” (AfterVirtue, p. 221). It would be misleading to assume that this tradition willnecessarily be fixed, or even clearly definable. On the contrary, MacIntyreinsists on the open-ended character of traditions and on the fact that theyderive their unity from an orientation toward goods which are contestedwithin the tradition itself. He insists that debate is necessary to the life ofan ongoing tradition: “A living tradition then is an historically extended,socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about thegoods which constitute that tradition” (After Virtue, p. 222).5 Correlatively,“when a tradition becomes Burkean [that is to say, fixed and static], it isalways dying or dead” (After Virtue, p. 222).Hence, traditions provide the necessary final stage for developing the

concept of a virtue because they comprise communities of inquiry thatrequire virtues for their continued existence:

The virtues find their point and purpose not only in sustaining those re-lationships necessary if the variety of goods internal to practices are to beachieved and not only in sustaining the form of an individual life in whichthat individual may seek out his or her good as the good of his or her wholelife, but also in sustaining those traditions which provide both practices andindividual lives with their necessary historical context. (After Virtue, p. 223)

These virtues will include (but will not be limited to) qualities of judg-ment and practical reason that enable the individual to discern how theinsights and commitments of a tradition might best be extended into thefuture: “It is rather the case that an adequate sense of tradition manifestsitself in a grasp of those future possibilities which the past hasmade availableto the present” (After Virtue, p. 223).


It is not necessary for our purposes to review the criticisms ofMacIntyre’s account of virtue and tradition in After Virtue in greater detailbecause, as he himself notes, this account is only a preliminary to a moredeveloped defense of a particular conception of moral rationality, which hesubsequently goes on to develop in his later works.6 Any assessment of hisoverall account of tradition must take his latter two books into account, es-pecially since these latter works modify the account of tradition developedinAfter Virtue in significant ways. At the same time, elements of this accountcontinue to inform MacIntyre’s later discussions of tradition. Although hedrops the claim that a tradition should be seen as a quest, he does retainthe sense that a tradition is centrally a kind of open-ended inquiry, ratherthan offering something fixed and static. And even though he focuses inWhose Justice? Which Rationality? on the epistemic functions of traditions,his development of the idea is still clearly governed by moral concerns,which come to the fore once again in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry.Finally, and most importantly, he continues to draw on the idea of traditionas a way of reformulating insights drawn from premodern authors into acontemporary idiom.Before moving on, we should also note that in one of his most recent

works MacIntyre repudiates one of the claims on which his developmentof the idea of tradition in After Virtue rests. In Dependent Rational Animals,he claims that he was mistaken to reject Aristotle’s “metaphysical biology”as a basis for virtue (Dependent Rational Animals, p. x). Although he doesnot want to endorse all the elements of Aristotle’s own view, he now assertsthat an adequate account of virtue must include some account of humanflourishing: “What it is for human beings to flourish does of course varyfrom context to context, but in every context it is as someone exercises in arelevant way the capacities of an independent practical reasoner that her orhis potentialities for flourishing in a specifically human way are developed”(Dependent Rational Animals, p. 77). It is perhaps significant that in this book,the concept of tradition plays almost no role, in contrast to each of his othermajor works following After Virtue.

2. WHOSE JUSTICE? WHICH RATIONALITY? RATIONALITYAS TRADITION-GUIDED INQUIRY

Whose Justice? Which Rationality? develops the critique of Enlightenmentliberalism first set forth in After Virtue, but unlike the earlier work, thisbook is intended to set forth a constructive theory as well as a critique. Asits title suggests, the critique in this book takes its starting point from the

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claim that it is possible to establish universally valid standards of justice,which can be recognized as such by any rational person (Whose Justice?,pp. 1–4; cf. the discussion of different conceptions of justice near the endof After Virtue, pp. 244–55). MacIntyre attempts to show that this claimis false through a close examination of conflicting ideals of justice thatemerged in three societies: ancient and classical Greece, medieval Europe,and eighteenth-century Scotland and England. His argument in each caseis that the ideals dividing these societies were not such as could have beenresolved through rational argument within a neutral framework of sharedbeliefs or principles, since in each case the conflicts were at least partlygrounded in incommensurable claims that shaped the ways in which theinterlocutors evaluated the relevant arguments and evidence (Whose Justice?,p. 351; cf. pp. 4–7).These conflicts among ideals of justicemight seem to lead to an impasse,

and so long as we stay within the parameters of an Enlightenment idealof rationality, we will indeed find that they cannot be resolved. It shouldbe noted that MacIntyre does not deny that there are some standards ofrationality that can be applied in any social or cultural context – for example,the fundamental laws of logic – but on his view these are not sufficient bythemselves to resolve the kinds of substantive conflicts that have emergedin debates over competing ideals of justice. (On the universal validity ofthe laws of logic and other similar rational principles, and their inadequacy,seeWhose Justice?, pp. 4, 351.) As MacIntyre argues in more detail later inthe book, this situation has led to the emergence of contemporary formsof skepticism about the possibility of establishing genuine truth claims ordeveloping rational arguments at all. But there is another alternative:

What the Enlightenment made us for the most part blind to and what wenow need to recover is, so I shall argue, a conception of rational enquiryas embodied in a tradition, a conception according to which the standardsof rational justification themselves emerge from and are part of a history inwhich they are vindicated by theway inwhich they transcend the limitationsof and provide remedies for the defects of their predecessors within thehistory of that same tradition. (Whose Justice?, p. 7)

The bulk of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is devoted to a remark-ably rich and detailed history of three of the four traditions that MacIntyrementions (liberalism receives a less extended consideration). With respectto the Aristotelian tradition of justice, he shows how it emerged out of thelimitations and inadequacies of the Homeric and Platonic views to emergeas one of the strongest traditions available in the medieval period. The


Augustinian tradition is similarly traced up to the point at which it comesinto conflict with the Aristotelian tradition in the Middle Ages. This con-flict is successfully resolved through Aquinas’s synthesis of Augustinian andAristotelian commitments through a reinterpretation of each in the lightof the other. Finally, MacIntyre traces the development of another kind ofsynthesis, namely, the distinctively Scottish synthesis of Calvinist and En-lightenment perspectives that provided a genuine alternative to Europeanversions of the Enlightenment until it was undermined through DavidHume’s “Anglicizing subversion.” (This narrative comprises the bulk ofWhose Justice?, pp. 12–348; the phrase “Anglicizing subversion” occurs onp. 281.)In the closing chapters of his book,MacIntyre turns to the development

of his constructive theory of rationality as tradition-guided inquiry. (Thebasic theory is developed in chapter 18, “The Rationality of Traditions,”Whose Justice?, pp. 349–369.) Drawing on the narratives of traditions inconflict developed in the first part of the book, he begins by rejecting whathe sees as the central claims of Enlightenment philosophy – the claim thatit is possible to arrive at a set of rational standards both universal in scopeand substantive enough to provide a basis for judging the beliefs and com-mitments of particular intellectual traditions. On the contrary, he argues,we are in the same situation as the ancient Greeks, medieval Europeans, oreighteenth-century Scots and Englishmen in that we must deal with socialand intellectual traditions that are to some significant degree incommensu-rable with one another. He does not claim that there can be no meaningfulcommunication at all between those who stand in incommensurable tradi-tions. Rather, he claims that for those in such a situation there will be atleast some disagreements that cannot be resolved by appeals to mutuallyagreeable standards of reasonableness and excellence because the disagree-ments have to do, at least in part, with those very standards themselves(Whose Justice?, pp. 4, 351). Hence, MacIntyre contends, since we cannotescape the necessity of arguing from within some tradition or other, wemust necessarily turn to the notion of a tradition to provide an alternativeframework for speculative as well as practical reasoning.At the same time, however, MacIntyre also rejects two positions that

are so often presented as the inevitable consequences of Enlightenmentfoundationalism:

[It might be said that] if the only available standards of rationality are thosemade available by and within traditions, then no issue between contendingtraditions is rationally decidable. . . . There can be no rationality as such.

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Every set of standards, every tradition incorporating a set of standards,has as much and as little claim to our allegiance as any other. Let us callthis the relativist challenge, as contrasted with a second type of challenge,that which we may call the perspectivist. . . . [T]he perspectivist challengeputs in question the possibility of making truth claims from within any onetradition. (Whose Justice?, p.352)

In contrast, MacIntyre proposes a third alternative, which will allow forstrong realist claims for the rationality and truth of specific claims withoutfalling into some version of Enlightenment foundationalism. The plausi-bility of both relativism and perspectivism derives from the fact that bothreflect the inversion of the Enlightenment ideal of a universally valid stan-dard of rationality and truth. Since this cannot be attained (and MacIntyreagrees that it cannot), the only alternative, it is said, is some form of rel-ativism or perspectivism. On the contrary, MacIntyre responds, there is athird alternative, the possibility that the development of traditions, bothinternally and in relation to one another, can itself be considered to be agenuinely rational process that, if it goes well, moves in the direction of anever-fuller grasp of reality (Whose Justice?, pp. 353–354). He goes on to de-velop this third alternative through an account of the rationality embeddedin the development of traditions.

The rationality of a tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive enquiryis in key and essential part a matter of the kind of progress which it makesthrough a number of well-defined types of stage. Every such formof enquirybegins in and from some condition of pure historical contingency, fromthe beliefs, institutions and practices of some particular community whichconstitute a given. (Whose Justice?, p. 354)7

Initially, these starting points are taken to be authoritative in such a wayas to be placed beyond question, or at least beyond systematic questioning.Butmatters cannot rest there. As the bearers of this tradition continue to re-flect on these canonical starting points, internal contradictions will becomeapparent, divergences of interpretation will emerge, and new circumstanceswill call into question the significance or the practicality of earlier norma-tive commitments. If the tradition is to survive at all, these tensions mustbe resolved and the tradition must be reformulated, to some degree at least,in order to retain its relevance and application in changing circumstances.At this point, a tradition has the resources to generate a concept of truth

as the adequation of mind to reality. If the bearers of a tradition succeed inresolving its internal tensions and carrying it forward successfully, they will


at some point be in a position to compare the earlier stages of that traditionwith its later, more successful stages. But by what criterion will they judgethat these later stages are in fact more successful? Whatever the specificsof the answer for a particular tradition, it will imply that the later stage ofan ongoing tradition is more adequate because it is in better accord withthe realities toward which it is directed. To be more exact, the tradition inits later stages will provide a more adequate framework within which toattain that adequation of the mind with its objects that MacIntyre takes tobe the authentic meaning of a correspondence theory of truth – not thatthe inhabitants of a tradition will necessarily express its greater adequacyin such terms.8 Once this possibility emerges, however, it implies that thepresent stage of any tradition (including the inquirer’s own) may similarlybe inadequate in some yet to be discovered way. And the emergence ofthis further possibility marks an important intellectual advance because, atthis point, one can no longer equate the truth of a given judgment with itsadequacy by the best standards of one’s tradition. In other words, at thispoint truth can no longer be equated with warranted assertability.MacIntyre notes that the development of a tradition is neither Cartesian

nor Hegelian: just as a tradition begins from contingent rather than neces-sary starting points, so its best conclusions are always provisional:

Implicit in the rationality of such enquiry there is indeed a conception ofa final truth, that is to say, a relationship of the mind to its objects whichwould be wholly adequate in respect of the capacities of that mind. But anyconception of that state as one in which the mind could by its own powersknow itself as thus adequately informed is ruled out; the Absolute Knowl-edge of the Hegelian system is from this tradition-constituted standpoint achimaera. (Whose Justice?, pp. 360–361)

MacIntyre goes on to observe that this fact, that tradition-constitutedinquiry does not provide for certainty in either its starting points or itsconclusions, gives credence to the perspectivist and relativist challenges.In order fully to address these challenges, it is necessary to turn to a fur-ther stage in the development of a tradition, which is occasioned by whatMacIntyre describes as an “epistemological crisis” (Whose Justice?, p. 361).At every stage in its development, a tradition in good order is constituted

by a dynamic process of development and adaptation. An epistemologicalcrisis occurs when this process is in some way stymied: “At any point, it mayhappen to any tradition-constituted enquiry that by its own standards ofprogress it ceases to make progress” (Whose Justice?, p. 361). At this point,the certitudes of the tradition are called into question and, in order to move

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forward, its exponentsmust engage in genuine conceptual innovation. Thatis to say, they must somehow arrive at new concepts or theories that arenot derived from the earlier stages of their tradition, which has so far beeninadequate to address the problems at hand; correlatively, these innovationscan only be justified in terms of their ability to resolve what had previouslybeen insurmountable difficulties. At this point, any retrospective history ofthe traditionwould incorporate some account of the crisis and its resolution.Because it is (by hypothesis) an account of a successful resolution, thisaccount will include (or imply) a claim to offer a more adequate way ofunderstanding the issues at hand. Correlatively, it will include (or imply) abetter understanding of the structures of justification than was previouslyavailable, in termsofwhich the earlier inadequacies of the tradition and theirsubsequent resolution can be understood. Not only do these claims implythe possibility ofmaking truth claims that gobeyondwarranted assertability,they actually amount to such truth claims, since they are themselves implicitor explicit claims for truth (both about the subject matter at hand, and aboutthe tradition itself ) that go beyond a defense of assertability in terms of thetradition as it exists at any one point.9 In this way, MacIntyre answers therelativist challenge that truth is equivalent to warranted assertability withinthe terms of a particular tradition. However, the perspectivist challengeremains to be fully addressed.In order to do so, MacIntyre considers a further (possible) stage in the

development of a tradition in epistemological crisis. That is, a crisis of thiskind creates a situation in which a fruitful encounter with a rival traditioncan take place and, as a result of such an encounter, proponents of the firsttraditionmay be forced to acknowledge that the rival offers a better accountof difficulties which they themselves could not have resolved – better, that is,by their own best standards of judgment. As a result, the proponents of thesetwo traditions are able to make a comparative judgment about the relativerational superiority of one tradition over another – precisely the kind ofjudgment that the perspectivist claims to be impossible. That, at least, isMacIntyre’s argument; in order to sustain it, he must offer a convincinganalysis of what is involved in the encounter between two traditions andthe relative vindication of one over and against the other.In order for an encounter between two rival traditions to take place, it is

first of all necessary that two rival traditions be brought into genuine con-tact. This requires more than an awareness of each tradition on the part ofthe bearers of the alternative tradition; it requires that some representativesof each tradition be in sustained contact with the other, and that they re-main sufficiently open to consider the claims of the rival tradition seriously.


Furthermore, it presupposes that bearers of each tradition are able to rec-ognize that the alternative represents a genuine rival, that the alternativeoffers a distinct account of the same realities with which they themselves areconcerned.Thus, the conceptual incommensurability between themcannotbe so great that proponents of each are unable to agree on at least a partiallyshared description of the world; otherwise, communication and translationof rival claims between them would be impossible. Before a physician anda shaman can recognize that they have incommensurable views of medi-cal practice, they must at least agree roughly on what counts as sickness.(Otherwise, theywouldnot be able to recognize that they represent two rivaltraditions, which offer two incommensurable approaches to the same realityor practical task.) At the same time MacIntyre insists, contrary to DonaldDavidson and others, that this level of agreement does not rule out genuinelogical incommensurability between the two traditions. (MacIntyre arguesfor this claim in detail in the chapter ofWhose Justice? called “Tradition andTranslation,” pp. 370–388; for Davidson’s argument, see Davidson 1974).The shared agreements are not sufficient by themselves to resolve the dif-ferences between the two traditions because, in addition, their proponentsbring radically different beliefs and standards of judgment to their evalua-tion of whatever it is that they recognize in common.At any rate, some degree of communication comprises only a neces-

sary condition for an encounter between rival traditions. In order for suchan encounter to take place, there must in addition be some members ofeach tradition who are able to enter imaginatively into the central beliefsand commitments of the other, at least provisionally. This process involvesassimilating the worldview of the rival tradition so that one can considerits claims, at least provisionally, as one’s own. Someone who is able in thisway to move between two ways of viewing the world is thereby enabledto recognize that the rival tradition offers conceptual possibilities that hisor her native tradition does not offer. From this vantage point, it becomespossible to see that problems which arise and appear to be insoluble withinone tradition may be resolvable from within the second tradition. And ifthis is indeed the case, then it makes sense for the proponents of the firsttradition to acknowledge that, by their own criteria of judgment, the secondtradition offers the possibility of a more adequate grasp of reality in at leastsome respects. In that case, if the proponents of the first tradition are tobe rational by their own best standards of judgment, they will acknowledge thesuperiority of the second tradition, at least in some respects, and will movetoward adopting its criteria for judgment, at least partially. Of course, theencounter may go in the other direction. But if an advocate of one tradition

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is to justify a claim to rational superiority over another tradition, he or shemust argue the case on the terms set by that rival tradition, initially at least,showing that by the standards set by the latter, his or her own tradition canbetter resolve what its proponents themselves feel to be serious difficulties.This is clearly a more developed and sophisticated account of traditions

than that offered in After Virtue. It cashes in the promise of the earlier bookto offer an account of rationality that does not reject, but on the contrarypresupposes, the socially and historically situated character of all practicaland speculative reason. Yet MacIntyre’s account of rationality as tradition-constituted inquiry also raises questions, both with respect to the relationbetween the concepts of tradition inAfter Virtue and inWhose Justice?WhichRationality?, and more generally with respect to the meaning of “tradition”as MacIntyre understands it.In comparing the earlier and later treatments, one difference immedi-

ately becomes apparent: what had initially been suggested as a moral con-cept, a part of the necessary framework for developing the idea of virtue, hasnow been transformed into an epistemic and linguistic concept, which playsa central role in explicating the meaning of truth and rationality. On thislatter view, a tradition in good order provides a framework within which themind approaches, perhaps even attains, that adequacy to its objects that forMacIntyre is the authentic meaning of a correspondence theory of truth.This view, in turn, implies that a tradition is itself referential, at least in abroad sense; it has a subject matter, it is “about” something that it mediatesto the intellects of those participating in it. This implication is not neces-sarily at odds with the view that a tradition is constituted by debates overthe good, but at the very least we see a significant change of emphasis here.In fact, these two different uses of tradition suggest two different un-

derstandings of what a tradition is. It is difficult it see how the account oftradition developed in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? could apply to allof the examples of traditions that were suggested by After Virtue: what ismonasticism “about,” and what kind of encounter with a rival could leadproponents of such a tradition to conclude that they have an inadequateaccount of the subject matter of their tradition?10 This brings us to a morefundamental question:What does itmean to say that any tradition is “about”something in the necessary sense? To put it another way, in what way cana tradition be considered to be referential, to be incommensurable withanother tradition, to be revised in light of a more adequate understandingof reality, and the like?MacIntyre does have an answer to this question, although to my

knowledge he does not develop it in these terms. The main lines of that


answer are suggested by one of his lesser-known recent works, a mono-graph based on his 1990 Marquette University Aquinas lecture, First Prin-ciples, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues.11 On first glance, thismonograph would seem to have little relevance to the topic of tradition.MacIntyre’s aim is to explain and defend Aquinas’ account of per se notaprinciples, arguing that while they are in some sense the starting pointsfor all reflection, they nonetheless do not function as foundational firstprinciples in a Cartesian sense.12 The key to understanding Aquinas’ ac-count, he argues, is found in the Aristotelian conception of a perfect science,which Aquinas takes over and extends (First Principles, pp. 25, 28–29). Onthe Aristotelian/Thomistic understanding of it, a perfected science wouldconsist of a series of propositions perspicuously derived from a set of firstprinciples, which are primary in the sense of being unjustified in terms ofthe science themselves, although they may be justified in terms of somehigher science. This in turn presupposes a hierarchy of sciences in whichthe highest sciences do rest on principles that are per se nota, which cor-relatively display the implications of these first principles (First Principles,pp. 36–37).So far, this seems to suggest an account of truth and rationality that is

not only irrelevant toMacIntyre’s account of rationality as tradition-guidedinquiry, but actually antithetical to it. However, at this point we need torecall a critical qualification that MacIntyre has already made, namely thatthe role played by the first principles in a completed science is logical orconceptual, but not epistemic. The claims of the science do in fact followfrom its first principles, but this may not be apparent until the scienceactually is completed, and the relation of its various claims is renderedperspicuous.13 Matters are very different whenwe are dealing with a sciencethat is still in the process of development – a condition that would apply tonearly every actual form of inquiry with which we have to deal.14

When we examine what MacIntyre has to say about the forms of in-quiry appropriate to a science under development, the relevance to hisdiscussion of tradition inWhose Justice? Which Rationality? becomes appar-ent. Even though MacIntyre does not describe a developing science as atradition in First Principles, his description of a science in the process of for-mation in this book is strikingly similar in several key respects to a traditionas described in the earlier book. It begins from contingent starting points, itdevelops through a process of self-correction and expansion until it reachesa level of complexity at which encounters with alternative explanations ofthe same set of phenomena can be fruitful, and it vindicates itself throughan ongoing series of encounters with its rivals, showing how its explanations

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aremore successful in terms that proponents of the rival tradition can them-selves acknowledge (see, respectively, First Principles, pp. 31; 34–35; 37–38;and 32). Finally, to turn to a point not yet remarked, a science in the pro-cess of development must be understood teleologically. That is to say, if anincipient science is fundamentally sound, it will develop in amore or less or-derly way toward greater comprehensiveness and clarity, although of courseMacIntyre does not claim that this will necessarily be a smooth, unbrokenprogression. Correlatively, a retrospective history of the development ofthe science will evaluate its various stages in terms of their contributionsto, or inadequacies in the light of, the best possible grasp of the aims of thescience attained so far (First Principles, pp. 47–51). This is at least congruentwith MacIntyre’s claim, first asserted in After Virtue and repeated inWhoseJustice? Which Rationality?, that the history of intellectual inquiry needs tobe written teleologically, in terms of some assessment of its successes andfailures.These points of contact suggest strongly that when MacIntyre speaks

of a tradition as a form of intellectual inquiry in the last chapters ofWhose Justice? Which Rationality?, what he has in mind, at least as theparadigm case of such an inquiry, is a developing science understood inthe Aristotelian/Thomistic sense of the term. The chief advantage of thisinterpretation is that it allows us to speak in a coherentway about the subjectmatter of a tradition, that which the tradition is “about,” and to character-ize it in terms of its adequacy to that subject matter. The referent of thetradition will be the object of the science, of which the tradition representsan incipient stage, and towards which its development is oriented so longas it is in good order. Correlatively, this suggests that traditions derive theiridentity and unity from this object in such a way that, for example, boththe Ptolemaic and Copernican traditions take their identity from themove-ments of heavenly bodies. At the same time, the success of the Copernicantradition relative to the Ptolemaic tradition has the further implication thatthe latter tradition, but not the former, can be superseded by being incorpo-rated into a wider tradition of inquiry into astronomical phenomena. ThePtolemaic tradition has simply been dropped; the Copernican tradition hasbeen transformed into a partial but (within limits) accurate account of anobject that can be more comprehensively understood in another way. (Thesame might be said of Aristotelian vs. Newtonian physics, seen in relationto contemporary relativistic physics.)15 Finally, this account has the inter-esting implication that we may not know what a tradition is about untilit approaches its final stages. That is, we may not be able to characterizethe identity of a given tradition, or to put it in its proper relation to other


traditions, until a fairly late stage in its development; indeed, we may cometo realize that our own apparent traditions are not only flawed but arenot even traditions at all because they lack any real unified object (perhapsastrology would be an example of a pseudo-tradition of this kind).What are we to make of the account of tradition developed in Whose

Justice?Which Rationality?This is clearly a more developed account than wefind in After Virtue, and it offers an advance in many respects. It providesa way of thinking about the epistemic functioning and rational status oftraditions that is interesting and (at least for this reader) persuasive. On thisaccount, genuine conversation and even intellectual conversion betweenproponents of rival traditions are possible, even though there is no point atwhich the interlocutors stand outside any tradition whatever.Wemight saythat, onMacIntyre’s view, the necessity for standing outside of any traditionwhatever is obviated by the possibility of standing within two traditionsat once in order to move between them in a comparative assessment oftheir claims. At the same time, this account of traditions offers a plausibleresolution of key questions in contemporary philosophical discussions oftruth and rationality, one that preserves a strong meaning for both termswithout resorting to a widely discredited foundationalism.However, it is not so clear that MacIntyre’s defense of the rationality of

tradition-guided inquiry can be translated straightforwardly into a defenseof moral rationality, or that it can address the problems of moral pluralismthat he raises inAfterVirtue.MacIntyre’s own agenda is set bymoral philoso-phy, and he explicitly says that the rationality exhibited in scientific disputesis no different from the rationality exhibited bymoral disputes (After Virtue,p. 268). Yet this is not evident. In my view,MacIntyre’s account of the ratio-nal development and encounter of traditions is most plausible when appliedto rival scientific traditions, understanding “scientific” broadly to includeany kind of inquiry which would fall under the ambit of what Aquinas calledthe speculative intellect.When these sorts of traditions break down or comeinto conflict, the resultant dialogue is conducted in a context of observa-tions about, and active engagement with, the natural world. It is true, ofcourse, that disagreements between incommensurable traditions cannot beresolved simply by appeals to observation, since the terms in which pro-ponents of rival traditions describe their observations are themselves indispute. Nonetheless, as noted above, there must be some level, howeverrudimentary, at which shared description is possible, or there could be noencounter between rival traditions at all. Correlatively, as conflicts betweenrival traditions are resolved, the parties to the conflict will find themselvesincreasingly converging on a shared description of the observed world.

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Yet as a number of moral philosophers have argued, moral claims can-not be placed on a par with scientific or observational claims because theyare grounded (in some sense) in our own collective commitments anddecisions.16 We, collectively, are the originators (usually not the consciousand deliberate originators) of the basic moral concepts that structure ourlives. Of course, it might be said that this view of moral claims is itself aproduct of amodern division between facts and values thatMacIntyre wantsto repudiate. But MacIntyre himself agrees that moral claims are at leastpartially grounded in our collective commitments. In commenting on theinfluence of Vico on his own work, MacIntyre remarks that Vico was thefirst to emphasize

the importance of the undeniable fact, which it is becoming tedious to reit-erate, that the subject matters of moral philosophy at least – the evaluativeand normative concepts, maxims, arguments and judgments about whichthe moral philosopher enquires – are nowhere to be found except as embodiedin the historical lives of particular social groups and so possessing the distinctivecharacteristics of historical existence: both identity and change through time,expression in institutionalized practice as well as in discourse, interactionand interrelationship with a variety of forms of activity. Morality whichis no particular society’s morality is to be found nowhere. (After Virtue,pp. 265–266; emphasis added)

Given this conception of morality, it is not clear how the rival claimsof disparate moral traditions could be adjudicated. Indeed, it is not clearthat there could be sufficient genuine conflict between moral traditions forthem to count as genuinely rival traditions. (A similar line of criticism isdeveloped in response to After Virtue in Bernstein 1984.) You, collectively,arrange your lives in one way, we arrange our lives in a different way. Isit clear that we even disagree? What is the shared subject matter of ourdisagreements? And what would count as resolving these disagreements,since there is no question here of coming to agree on a description ofanything? Certainly, we might come to agree on the best way to arrangeour lives, but that would represent a change inmores, and not a convergenceof thinking about a shared object of inquiry. This need not imply that moraltraditions are arational in their internal development or their contact withother traditions, but it does suggest that an account of practical reasoncannot simply be read off from the account of rationality as tradition-basedinquiry that MacIntyre develops.In response to this, MacIntyre would probably reply that he does offer

extended accounts of moral traditions in conflict in both After Virtue and


Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, to say nothing of the subsequent ThreeRivalVersions of MoralEnquiry. (SeeMacIntyre’s response toBernstein 1984,MacIntyre 1984b.) Certainly, the narratives developed in these books dooffer impressive support for his overall thesis. Yet they do not fully addressthe questions raised above. While the scope of this essay does not allow fora detailed assessment of MacIntyre’s narratives, let me suggest three issuesthat remain to be addressed.First, the moral traditions MacIntyre discusses are almost always tradi-

tions that are contiguous in some way; they represent successor traditionswithin European society (classical and Hellenistic traditions, Augustinianand Thomistic Christianity), or else they are contemporaneous and havedeveloped in close proximity with one another (Scottish and English tradi-tions in earlymodernity). At the very least, this suggests that the proponentsof these traditions would have had a great deal in common, including (inmany cases) a shared past and many common customs and institutions. Ofcourse, this does not rule out the possibility of incommensurability amongthem; indeed, it may be that some very considerable commonalities of thesekinds are necessary if moral traditions are to come into conflict in the senserequired forMacIntyre’s theory at all. However, this does raise the questionof how MacIntyre’s theory of rationality as tradition-guided inquiry woulddeal with the case of moral traditions that did not develop in contact with,or dependence upon, one another, and that therefore do not emerge withina context of shared history, institutions, and customs. Would any rationalencounter between such traditions be possible at all, and if so, how mightit be resolved?17

Second, it is not always obvious that the traditions MacIntyre sees ascoming into conflict do in fact conflict as moral traditions. This is espe-cially true with respect to the conflict he identifies between Aristotelian-ism and Augustinian Christianity. Certainly, these do come into conflicton questions of theology, metaphysics, and epistemology, but it is not soclear that they are also incommensurably at odds with respect to moralcommitments.18 MacIntyre claims that every philosophical inquiry haspractical implications, and so he might respond that incommensurability atthe theoretical level implies incommensurability at the practical level (ThreeRival Versions, p. 128). But even if we grant that every theoretical inquiryhas practical implications (and this is not obvious), the conclusion does notfollow. MacIntyre would have to show that the specific points of incom-mensurability he identifies did in fact lead to specific, incommensurablejudgments, and this (in my view) he does not do, at least in the case of theAristotelian and Augustinian traditions.

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Finally, and more specifically, MacIntyre underestimates the extent towhich Aristotelian concepts had already shaped Christian moral thoughtbefore the reintroduction of Aristotle’s philosophical and moral works intoWestern Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As the historianCary Nederman points out, key elements of Aristotle’s moral thought weremediated to Christian theology through a number of classical and patris-tic sources, and can be identified in medieval writings at least 150 yearsbefore the reintroduction of Aristotle’s Nicomachaean Ethics into the West(Nederman 1991). This may seem like a minor point, and yet MacIntyrehimself insists that his historical narrative is foundational to his philosophi-cal argument: “I am committed to maintaining that although arguments ofthe kind favored by analytic philosophy do possess an indispensable power,it is only within the context of a particular genre of historical inquiry thatsuch arguments can support the type of claim about truth and rationalitywhich philosophers characteristically aspire to justify” (After Virtue, p. 265).Furthermore, MacIntyre’s analysis of the encounter between Aristotelianand Augustinian thought plays a pivotal role both inWhose Justice? WhichRationality? and the subsequent Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Giventhis, the relevance ofNederman’s observation toMacIntyre’s project cannotbe denied.I do not mean to suggest that MacIntyre could not address these issues,

but only to indicate points at which his theory seems to call for furtherdevelopment. Moreover, it would not necessarily represent a defect in thattheory if wewere forced to conclude that, in some cases,moral traditions areso profoundly divergent that no genuine encounter, or much less rationalengagement and vindication of one over the other, can take place.

3. TRADITION AS A FORM OF MORAL INQUIRY: THREE RIVAL VERSIONSOF MORAL ENQUIRY

In Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, MacIntyre offers a more extendedillustration and defense of the central thesis ofWhose Justice? Which Ratio-nality? that

an admission of significant incommensurability and untranslatability in therelations between two opposed systems of thought and practice can be aprologue not only to rational debate, but to that kind of debate from whichone party can emerge as undoubtedly superior, if only because exposure tosuch debate may reveal that one of the contending standpoints fails in itsown terms and by its own standards. (Three Rival Versions, p. 5)


This book thus continues the trajectory of its predecessor, and in ad-dition, it returns to themes from After Virtue that were not so promi-nent in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? At the same time, this latestbook also modifies the earlier account of tradition in subtle but significantways.In order to trace the outlines of the concept of tradition developed

in this third book, we must first place MacIntyre’s discussion of traditionwithin the context of his overall argument. The eponymous three rivalversions which he considers are encyclopaedia, exemplified by the authorsof the late-nineteenth-century ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica,genealogy, exemplified by Nietzsche and his current postmodern heirs, andThomism, which properly understood entails an explicit commitment totradition-based inquiry.The encyclopaedists were characterized by the belief that it is possible

to arrive at a set of universal standards, compelling to all rational persons,within which the rival claims of different cultures and modes of inquirycan be assessed and resolved (Three Rival Versions, p. 14). Clearly, this rep-resents a version of the Enlightenment project, and MacIntyre finds it nomore persuasive than he did when he wrote After Virtue; in his view, theclaims of the encyclopaedists have been decisively defeated (Three RivalVersions, pp. 55–56). The genealogists, in contrast, appear to him to offeran alternative form of moral inquiry that is still, so to speak, in play, inso-far as it has yet to be decisively answered by its strongest antagonists. Onthe genealogists’ view, the development of inquiry reflects social forces be-yond it, and more particularly relations of power, which intellectual inquiryserves to both support and conceal. The genealogist attempts to develop analternative mode of discourse, characterized by the adoption and expres-sions of a multiplicity of perspectives, none of which is given foundationalor definitive status (Three Rival Versions, pp. 35–36, 42–43). The genealo-gist also takes on the task of unmasking, revealing the social arrangementsand special interests that seemingly pure theoretical constructs serve toconceal.Before turning to a closer examination of his construal of Thomism as

tradition-based inquiry, we need to consider one other aspect of these tworivals. That is, in what sense are these traditions of moral inquiry? Whenwe compare the two, it is striking that, while both have moral implica-tions, these implications are central for the genealogical project in a waythat they are not for the encyclopaedists. (And although he does not ex-plicitly say so, this may be another reason why, on MacIntyre’s view, thegenealogists represent the stronger alternative.) For the encyclopaedists,

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the paradigmatic moral narrative is exemplified by Agnes Mary Clerke, anastronomer and historian of science who contributed articles on the livesof the astronomers to the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.Clerke moved from a sheltered girlhood in Ireland to private study inItaly, eventually to become, in MacIntyre’s words, one of “the foremostminds of her age.” What is paradigmatic about her story, as he goes onto explain, is its steady progress from cultural isolation to enlightenment,understood in terms of participation in the highest rational discourse ofthe age (Three Rival Versions, p. 21). The genealogists, for their part, clearlybring a moral agenda to their work, driven by the desire to expose theinequities and especially the relations of power and dominion hidden byall forms of intellectual discourse. As this would suggest, they are com-mitted to ideals of equality and individual freedom, seen over againstthe oppressive structures of control concealed by intellectual discourse –an agenda with which, as we have noted, MacIntyre has a great deal ofsympathy.Having sketched these two alternatives, MacIntyre goes on in Three

Rival Versions to set forth his own preferred alternative, namely traditionas a form of intellectual and moral inquiry. He takes Pope Leo XIII’s en-cyclical Aeterni Patris to be the seminal nineteenth-century statement ofthis alternative, and he argues that a Thomism that is true to the spirit andintention of Aquinas’ own work offers the best option for carrying forwarda tradition-based inquiry today (Three Rival Versions, p. 2).Correlatively, the extended example of tradition-based inquiry that

MacIntyre offers is taken from Christian thought in late antiquity and theMiddle Ages, beginning with Augustine and culminating with Aquinas. OnMacIntyre’s view, Augustine develops what becomes the canonical formula-tion of Christianity as an intellectual tradition, at least forWestern Europe,through his synthesis of Scripture and neo-Platonism (Three Rival Versions,pp. 82–103). This synthesis dominated both intellectual and institutionalstructures up until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, including, signif-icantly, the University of Paris, which was structured on the basis of theAugustinian conviction that “rationality [is] internal to a system of beliefsand practices in such a way that, without acceptance at some fundamentallevel of those beliefs and initiation into the form of life defined by thosepractices, rational encounter with Augustinianism is ruled out, except in themost limited way” (Three Rival Versions, p. 98). At the same time, however,the universities, and above all the University of Paris, provide the insti-tutional setting for a radical challenge to Augustinianism in the form of arevitalized Aristotelianism.


According to MacIntyre, Aristotle’s thought challenged Augustiniantheology in three fundamental ways: (1) Aristotle defended the natural ca-pacity of the intellect to know its proper objects, whereas for Augustine, arealization of the intellect’s incapacity is the necessary starting point for allintellectual and moral progress; (2) Aristotle identifies truth as the corre-spondence of the mind to its object, whereas Augustine locates it in thesource of the relationship between finite objects and the primal truth, thatis to say, God; (3) finally, Aristotle has no concept of the will, whereasfor Augustine the will exists and is the primary source of moral error. Inshort, these authors reflect two incommensurable approaches to intellectualinquiry:

For each contending party had no standard by which to judge the ques-tions about which it differed from the other which was not itself as much indispute as anything else. And there was no possible neutral standard, sinceall three key areas of disagreements are part of a systematically differentand incompatible conceptualization of the human intellect in its relation-ship to its objects, to the passions, to the will, and to the virtues. (ThreeRival Versions, p. 111; the three areas of disagreement are spelled out onpp. 109–111)

At the same time, these rival and incommensurable claims found aninstitutional setting in the University of Paris, where the philosophers inthe faculty of liberal arts tended to defend Aristotelian thought, whereasthe theologians defended the Augustinian alternative (Three Rival Versions,pp. 112–113).Aquinas resolved these competing claims through a systematic reformu-

lation of Aristotelian thought in Christian terms (just as Augustine had re-solved similar tensions through a synthesis ofNeoplatonism and Scripture).Not only did he show that Aristotle’s thought need not be inimical toChristian doctrine, he also demonstrated that Christian theology offersa more adequate resolution to problems Aristotle himself recognized butcould not resolve. In so doing, he transformed theNeoplatonic Christianityof Augustine, but he transformed Aristotle as well, showing how a properlyreformulated Christianity is in fact the best continuation of Aristotelianismas an intellectual tradition. By the same token, he offered a radical chal-lenge to the university structures of his time, since he placed the study ofAristotle within the ambit of the theologians rather than the philosophers(in general, see Three Rival Versions, pp. 127–148; in particular, see pp. 122–124; and with reference to Aquinas’ challenge to university structures,pp. 132–133).

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As this brief summary suggests, and as MacIntyre himself argues, theview of tradition offered here is similar in key respects to that developedinWhose Justice? Which Rationality? (MacIntyre summarizes his key claimsabout incommensurability and the possibility of rational encounter betweenrival traditions in Three Rival Versions at pp. 116–120.) Tradition is seen asfundamentally a form of intellectual inquiry, characterized by its own dis-tinctive form of rationality. As in the earlier book, the development of tra-dition is seen as a necessarily historical process, driven both by the internaltensions of a given tradition and by the dynamics of encounter with othertraditions. The test of adequacy lies in the possibility of carrying a traditionforward; the test of rational superiority is found in the ability of one traditionto offer a more adequate account and resolution of the difficulties andinconsistencies of another than that other tradition can do on its ownterms.At the same time, MacIntyre qualifies his earlier account of tradition in

a significant way. That is, in this book he emphasizes the parallels betweenintellectual inquiry and the practice of a craft, parallels that become evidentoncewe realize that “to be adequately initiated into a craft is to be adequatelyinitiated into a tradition” (Three Rival Versions, p. 128). Of course the ideaof a practice, presumably including crafts, also played a central role inAfter Virtue. But, at the very least, the parallels MacIntyre draws betweenintellectual inquiry and the practice of a craft represent a new emphasis inhis thought, and they point to two significant modifications of his conceptof a tradition.Why does MacIntyre emphasize initiation into a craft as a paradigmatic

example of initiation into a tradition?Most fundamentally, hewants tomakethe point that initiation into a tradition requires certain kinds of relation-ships and, correspondingly, certain personal qualities and attitudes, whichare particularly apparent when we consider what is involved in becomingproficient in a craft, but which are just as necessary for initiation into a tra-dition of inquiry. Indeed, rightly understood, moral inquiry is itself a craftrequiring certain kinds of relationships and personal qualities (Three RivalVersions, p. 63). It is first of all necessary that the initiate stand in a relationof trust to a master or teacher, someone who is able to judge the qualityof the initiate’s work and to direct him or her on how to go further (ThreeRival Versions, pp. 65–66). At least initially, the initiate must be prepared toact on the master’s directions without him- or herself being able to graspthe point of those directions; that is to say, initiation into intellectual in-quiry is impossible except on the condition that the novice be prepared toaccept some form of intellectual authority (Three Rival Versions, pp. 89–93;


at this point, MacIntyre is discussing the Augustinian tradition in partic-ular, but he clearly believes that the same may be said of tradition-basedinquiry in general). This places tradition-based inquiry squarely at oddswith both the encyclopaedists and the genealogists since, for the former,rationality demands that from the outset one think for oneself, and for thelatter, such forms of authority can only be expressions of power (Three RivalVersions, p. 66). Correlatively, the initiate must be open to developing cer-tain personal qualities, namely, an adherence to the goods constitutive ofthe tradition and a willingness to develop virtues in accordance with thosegoods. Only in this way can he or she develop the capacities of insightand judgment necessary to grasp the central texts and commitments of thetradition (Three Rival Versions, pp. 62–63).Tradition-based inquiry thus offers direct and fundamental challenges to

the conceptions of intellectual inquiry offered by both alternatives.How arethese to be adjudicated? As a self-professed partisan of tradition, MacIntyreattempts to defend the claims of tradition in a way suggested by that modeof inquiry: he considers how each of these forms of inquiry has fared inresolving its inner tensions and in defending itself against its challengers.He makes short work of the encyclopaedists, as we noted above. The con-flict with the genealogists, on the other hand, is for him still very muchan open issue. In his view, tradition-based inquiry will ultimately be vindi-cated, and he suggests that one point at which its relative superiority willbe vindicated lies in its capacity to give a more adequate account of theself. However, he acknowledges that this forecast needs to be defended atmore length throughongoing argument and encounter (ThreeRivalVersions,pp. 196–215).The scope of this chapter does not permit amore extended assessment of

MacIntyre’s arguments in this brief but ambitious work.19 To a considerabledegree, it represents a defense and extension of the account of rationalityas tradition-guided inquiry developed inWhose Justice? Which Rationality?,and anyone who finds that account fundamentally persuasive (as I do) willlikewise findmuch of this book to be persuasive. At the same time, this bookmodifies MacIntyre’s earlier accounts of tradition in subtle but significantways, and these modifications raise questions about the overall direction ofMacIntyre’s project. Let me focus on one such question, that of the roleplayed by authority in the processes of initiation into and participation in atradition.As we have seen, in his earlier accounts of tradition MacIntyre has

emphasized the open-ended and even conflictual character of traditions,so much so that he sometimes has been characterized as a crypto-liberal

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himself.20 In this book, however, he underscores another aspect of tradi-tions, the essential role played by authority in tradition-based inquiry. Thisnew emphasis is signaled early in the book:

[The dichotomy between encyclopaedia and genealogy conceals] a thirdpossibility, the possibility that reason can only move towards beinggenuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disin-terested, that membership in a particular type of moral community, one fromwhich fundamental dissent has to be excluded, is a condition for genuinely ratio-nal enquiry and more especially for moral and theological enquiry. (ThreeRival Versions, pp. 59–60; emphasis added)

InWhose Justice?Which Rationality?MacIntyrementioned one respect inwhich authority plays a necessary role in tradition-based inquiry. He arguesthat every tradition starts from contingent commitments, usually embod-ied in oral or written texts that are initially given authoritative status. Butthis form of authority is only provisional since, as a tradition begins to de-velop, these authoritative texts will be inevitably subject to questioning andreinterpretation; indeed,MacIntyre suggests that this process is a necessaryfirst stage in the emergence of tradition-situated rationality. In Three RivalVersions he reaffirms the necessity for this kind of authority (p. 91).At the same time, in the latter book he adds two further respects in

which authority is necessary to the functioning of tradition. One of these isimplicit in the relationship between an initiate and master of any tradition-embedded practice. Every apprentice in a craft, including the craft of intel-lectual inquiry, must learn how to make two key distinctions, first betweena course of action that appears to be good and a course of action that isgenuinely good, and second between that which is good and best for theindividual and that which is good and best without qualification (Three RivalVersions, pp. 61–62). In each case, the initiate can only learn through rely-ing on the judgment of a master who is capable of making the distinctionsthat the initiate cannot yet make, and whose directives must therefore beaccepted as authoritative. The authority of the master, correlatively, is notjust an authority of expertise or accomplishment:

The authority of a master within a craft is both more and other than amatter of exemplifying the best standards so far. It is also and most impor-tantly a matter of knowing how to go further and especially how to directothers towards going further, using what can be learned from the traditionafforded by the past to move towards the telos of fully perfected work. Itis in thus knowing how to link past and future that those with authority


are able to draw upon tradition, to interpret and reinterpret it, so that itsdirectedness towards the telos of that particular craft becomes apparent innew and characteristically unexpected ways. And it is by the ability to teachothers how to learn this type of knowing how that the power of the masterwithin the community of a craft is legitimated as rational authority. (ThreeRival Versions, pp. 65–66)

As this paragraph illustrates, MacIntyre’s claim for the necessity of au-thority in this second sense draws upon the discussion of practices andtheir relation to tradition in After Virtue. MacIntyre has modified the ear-lier account in some respects; most significantly, he now appears to equatetradition-based inquiry with a kind of practice, whereas in the earlier bookthe idea of a practice plays a more preliminary and limited role in his over-all account of virtue and tradition. Nonetheless, this represents a plausibleextension of insights from After Virtue, even though the relation betweenMacIntyre’s earlier and later accounts of practices and traditions could befurther clarified.However, this form of authority, like the first we have considered, does

not appear to exclude “fundamental dissent.” At least on first glance, itwould seem to be provisional – apprentices eventually become mastersthemselves – and moreover it is limited in scope, since it is located withina particular relationship. This suggests a third form of authority, and read-ing on we find that MacIntyre does assert the need for some authoritativepresence that can oversee the development of a tradition as a whole. Thefunctioning of this kind of authority was exemplified by Peter Abelard’swilling acceptance of the authority of the church after his condemnation asa heretic: “it is also true that Abelard did challenge established authority, butyet by his own obedient acceptance of established authority’s response hedid as much as anyone to clarify the relationship of dialectic to authority”(Three Rival Versions, p. 89, emphasis in the original; MacIntyre goes on todevelop this interpretation of Abelard’s conflicts with Bernard and otherson pp. 90–91). Furthermore, acceptance of this kind of authority is implicitin the other two forms discussed above, since as we progress in inquirywe come to realize that authoritative testimony will always be necessary tointellectual progress:

So continuous authority receives its justification as indispensable to a con-tinuing progress, the narrative of which we first learned how to recountfrom that authority and the truth of which is confirmed by our own furtherprogress, including that progress made by means of dialectical enquiry.

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The practice of specifically Augustinian dialectic and the belief of theAugustinian dialectician that this practice is a movement towards a truthnever as yet wholly grasped thus presupposes the guidance of authority.Hence when the very same authority places restrictions upon dialectic en-quiry, it would be unreasonable not to submit. Abelard’s submission, there-fore, unlikeGalileo’s was of a piecewith his enquiries. The acknowledgmentof authority was already an essential element in those enquiries. (Three RivalVersions, pp. 92–93; italics added)

So far as I can determine, MacIntyre does not consider this aspect ofthe Augustinian conception of moral inquiry to have been superseded byAquinas’ synthesizing reformulation, and if this is indeed the case, we mayassume that he endorses this conception of authority. Yet it raises ques-tions that go to the core of his account of rationality as tradition-guidedinquiry.The first of these is implicit in the phrase emphasized above: what jus-

tification do we have for considering the authority granted to the canonicaltexts of a tradition, the authority of amaster in relation to an apprentice, anda centralized authority that oversees an extended program of research anddiscussion, to be different forms of one and the same authority? On the faceof it, not only is this claim not obvious, it is not even plausible. To take thecase of Abelard, it seems clear that Scripture, Roscelin, and the Pope stoodin three different relations to Abelard, and exercised three distinct kindsof authority over him. How could it be otherwise? After all, authoritativetexts or lore must be mediated through the pedagogy of individual mastersor teachers; very few of those who participate in a tradition can have a per-sonal relation with its central authority figures, as they do with their ownteachers. Furthermore, within a complex tradition there are likely to bemany loci for authority, appealing to different rationales and functioning indifferent ways. Certainly, medieval theologians distinguished the teachingauthority of a master, which depends on his personal competence, from theteaching authority of a bishop, which attaches to his office. (On this point,see Congar 1982 and Rist 1994, pp. 56–63.)This observation brings us to a further point. It may be that MacIntyre

does not argue for his concept of authority because he considers that thehistory of the period evidently vindicates it. Yet vindication is not evident.MacIntyre’s sources for medieval history are fairly dated, and he does nottake account of amore recent considerable body of work on the interactionsbetween social and intellectual developments in this period. As a result,he does not take account of the ways in which the location of authority,


its scope, and its proper limits were themselves contested in the medievalperiod.21 Even when particular authorities were generally recognized, thatdid not mean that specific exercises of those forms of authority were gen-erally recognized as legitimate. Given this, it is difficult to see how any oneinstitution or individual, even the Pope, could have exercised the kind offinal and unquestioned authority that MacIntyre seems to consider to benecessary.The example of Abelard illustrates this point. OnMacIntyre’s interpre-

tation of his story, Abelard willingly submits to the accusations of heresybrought against him by Bernard of Clairvaux and accepts the judgment onhim implicit in that accusation: “It was clearly pride of will which Bernarddiscerned in Abelard and which Abelard acknowledged by his submissionthat he had discerned in himself” (Three Rival Versions, p. 91). But this is avery quick – and it must be said, a dubious – summary of a complex story. (Inwhat follows, I rely on Clanchy 1997, pp. 288–325, and Marenbon 1997,pp. 7–35.)Abelard’s works were subject to ecclesiastical scrutiny twice, the first

time at the Council of Soissons in 1121, and then a second time at theCouncil of Sens in 1140. The first of these investigations resulted fromaccusations from Abelard’s fellow scholastics, while the second was duelargely (but not exclusively) to the initiative ofBernard ofClairvaux. Abelarddid indeed submit to the condemnation of Soissons, but it is not clearwhy he did so. One of his contemporaries suggested that he did so outof fear of a violent popular uprising, and given the fate of other accusedheretics at the time, that would not have been an unreasonable fear. Hisbiographer M. T. Clanchy suggests that he was also broken psychologicallyby the experience, an interpretation which takes support from Abelard’sown later claim that he was in despair and insane at the time (Clanchy 1997,p. 305).At any rate, Abelard’s experiences at Soissons did not keep him from

continuing to take what were considered to be heretical views; in the wordsof Bernard, writing in 1140, “one head, a single heresy of his was cut off atSoissons; but now seven greater ones have grown up in its place” (Clanchy1997, p. 289). The condemnation of Sens was inconclusive, in part be-cause Abelard appealed to the judgment of the Pope and then left beforethe council had concluded. Subsequently, Abelard appealed to Peter, theAbbot of Cluny, for protection, thus illustrating on a practical level howdifferent loci of authority could be played off one another at this time. As ithappened, Pope Innocent II did condemn Abelard, but thanks to Peter’s in-tervention, the full force of his condemnation appears to have been blunted,

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and Abelard was allowed to end his days in peace in a Cluniac priory nearChalon-sur Saone. It is not clear that Abelard ever did submit to the con-demnation of Sens, as confirmed by Innocent II. In his letter to the Pope,Peter claimed that Abelard had made peace with Bernard, but we are notclear exactlywhat thismeans.At any rate, there is little evidence thatAbelardever acknowledged the sin of prideful heresy in himself, as MacIntyre sug-gests. Clanchy suggests an opposite conclusion: “It cannot be emphasizedtoo strongly that Abelard approved of the prosecution of heretics as muchas the pope or St. Bernard did. The difference between them was thatAbelard always thought his own opinions were the height of orthodoxyand his opponents were therefore deluded or malicious” (Clanchy 1997,p. 319).I have dwelt at some length on the question of authority in the latest

of MacIntyre’s extended discussions of tradition because his insistence onthe necessity for an authoritative control on tradition-based inquiry raisesfundamental questions for his understanding of rationality as tradition-based inquiry. Why should authoritative interventions be necessary in or-der to prevent “the development of dialectical argument from fracturing theunity of enquiry into a multitude of disagreements” (Three Rival Versions,p. 91)? Why are the processes of self-correction and ongoing reflectionoutlined inWhose Justice? Which Rationality? not sufficient for this purpose?Even more fundamentally, how does MacIntyre see the relation betweenauthority and the emergence and resolution of an epistemological crisis?What is to prevent authoritative prohibitions of dissent from allowing anepistemological crisis to emerge, or from disallowing the kinds of innova-tions that MacIntyre claims are necessary to the resolution of that crisis?MacIntyre’s comparison of Abelard with Galileo highlights the difficulties.On MacIntyre’s view, Abelard takes the proper attitude towards author-ity, whereas Galileo does not; and yet, as MacIntyre himself goes on toacknowledge, it is Galileo who is rationally vindicated by subsequent de-velopments. How can we escape the conclusion that, in this case, authorityfunctioned to undermine, rather than to promote, rationality? It may wellbe that MacIntyre can answer these questions through a more extendedanalysis of the warrants and scope of authority within a tradition, but hehas yet to do so.MacIntyre’s works have enjoyed a deservedly wide influence, not only

among his fellow philosophers, but among theologians, social scientists,and educated men and women generally. It is a mark of the significanceand richness of his work that it should suggest so many avenues for furtherreflection. It is to be hoped that he will return to some of the issues raised


here in his futureworks, developing and extending the account of rationalityas tradition-guided inquiry set forth in his recent works.22

Notes

1. The moral significance of the role of the bureaucratic manager is discussedin After Virtue, pp. 26–27, and the role of the therapist is discussed onpp. 30–31.

2. Julia Annas makes a similar point in Annas 1989, pp. 388–404. As we will seebelow, MacIntyre does remark, in both After Virtue and Whose Justice? WhichRationality?, that a tradition is an extended argument over the goods that con-stitute it; but this observation, while suggestive and important, does not seem tobe a definition of “tradition,” particularly since MacIntyre later adds the qual-ification that participants in a tradition must be aware of themselves as such,which would presumably not apply to every historically extended dispute overthe nature of the good; seeWhose Justice?, p. 326.

3. For MacIntyre’s own overview of his argument, see After Virtue, p. 1–5.4. These three stages also seem to be recapitulated in the process of individualacquisition of the virtues, although this is not emphasized in After Virtue; seeMacIntyre 1992b.

5. Similarly, in his next book he asserts that “a tradition is an argument extendedthrough time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and rede-fined in terms of two kinds of conflict,” namely between proponents of thetradition and its opponents, and internally among those who would interpretits central tenets in different ways; seeWhose Justice?, p. 12.

6. MacIntyre himself offers a good summary and response to the mainlines of criticism in the Postscript to the second edition of After Virtue,pp. 264–278. For a particularly valuable set of reflections and criticisms,together with MacIntyre’s response, see the papers collected for a sympo-sium sponsored by the British journal Inquiry: Clark 1983, Gaita 1983,MacIntyre 1983d and O’Neill 1983; see also MacIntyre 1984a and Wartofsky1984.

7. In what follows, I rely on MacIntyre’s exposition of his theory inWhose Justice?,pp. 349–369.

8. MacIntyre emphasizes that the correspondence in question is between themind and its object, not between a concept or statement and its refer-ent (as the correspondence theory is usually formulated); see Whose Justice?,pp. 356–357.

9. My remarks in this paragraph go beyond what MacIntyre explicitly says, butI believe that they are implied by his arguments; see Whose Justice?, pp. 363–364.

10. Admittedly, this accountwouldfit at least someof the exampleswhichMacIntyreoffers in After Virtue, for example farming or medicine; see After Virtue, p. 222.But in light of the argument to be developed below, it is significant that these

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are traditions in which practical success is closely linked to success in speculativetheories about the world.

11. Compare the much briefer, but essentially similar, analysis of deduction, di-alectic, and the idea of a science according to Aristotle and Aquinas in WhoseJustice?, pp. 172–173.

12. A principle is per se nota (“known through itself”) if the predicate is in someway implied by the meaning of the subject; however, such principles are notnecessarily self-evident to us because the meaning of the relevant terms mayonly be apparent after extensive reflection.

13. On the logical, as opposed to epistemic, priority of first principles, see FirstPrinciples, p. 10; cf. pp. 34–35. MacIntyre also emphasizes this point in WhoseJustice?, pp. 172–173. MacIntyre goes on to say that the relation between thefirst principles and the claims of the science is a result, not a starting point, forinvestigation at First Principles, p. 30.

14. In my view, a plausible case can be made that physics is on the way to be-coming a perfected science, and it is conceivable that some other physi-cal sciences (astronomy, geology) and some branches of mathematics mightsimilarly attain this status. However, given MacIntyre’s very strong remarkson the impossibility of any intellect to know that it has attained final anddefinitive knowledge on some subject, he might well claim that no sciencecan be considered to be perfected, even if we may reach a point at whichwe cannot imagine what a successful challenge to the science would looklike.

15. This goes beyond what MacIntyre explicitly says, but I believe it is a straight-forward extension of his views.

16. For an early and underrated defense of this view, see Kovesi 1967; for morerecent examples, see Searle 1995 and Williams 1985. There are of course sig-nificant differences among the views of these three philosophers.

17. MacIntyre does attempt one such investigation in MacIntyre 1990b, but this islittle more than a sketch of issues. For an example of an extended study thatdoes attempt to identify and (partially) to resolve conflicts between two widelyseparated moral traditions, see Yearly 1990.

18. This is particularly evident from his summary of the points of conflict in ThreeRival Versions, pp. 109–113.

19. In view of the emphasis on medieval history in what follows, I would like toacknowledge my general indebtedness to Kent 1995, pp. 1–38, which is par-ticularly helpful in placing MacIntyre’s interpretation within the context of thehistoriography of the period as it developed in the early twentieth century. Igenerally agree with her specific criticisms, but pursue a somewhat differentline in what follows.

20. By myself, at any rate; see Porter 1993.21. For MacIntyre’s sources, see Three Rival Versions, pp. 103–104; the most recent

work cited was published in 1985. The following offer useful perspectives onthe relation between social and intellectual developments in the twelfth andthirteenth centuries: Constable 1996; Lawrence 1994; Little 1978; Southern


1995; Spruyt 1994, pp. 59–150; and van Caenegem 1988. All of these bring outsome aspects of the ways in which conflicts of authority shaped intellectual lifein this period. Of course, MacIntyre could not have consulted the most recentworks on this list.

22. I would like to thank the Reverend Kevin Lowery for invaluable assistance withthe bibliographic research for this chapter.

3 MacIntyre in the Province of thePhilosophy of the Social SciencesS T E P H E N P . T U R N E R

MacIntyre’s early writings include a series of books and papers, primar-ily published from the late fifties to the early seventies (Unconscious, ShortHistory,Marxism and Christianity, Self-Images; and MacIntyre 1957a, 1960,1962, 1965c, 1966a, 1967a, 1967b, 1967c, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1974), butcontinuing throughout his career (1977a, 1978a, 1978b), in the ill-defineddomain of the philosophy of social science. A number of other writings(1986a, 1986b, 1991d, 1994f ), including After Virtue, rely in various wayson social science concepts, and a final category of writing includes a longseries of book reviews of social science and social theory texts and con-cepts (1978d, 1979a, 1979b, 1979c, 1995c, 1998b). One view of the clusterof early papers is that they are juvenilia that have little to do with thephase of his work that begins with the publication of After Virtue. Yet thisargument does not square very well with the fact that MacIntyre neverstopped writing papers of this kind, or the fact that he continues to referto the inspiration of such figures as the anthropologist Franz B. Steiner, orthe fact that MacIntyre continues to describe his project in social scienceterms such as “social structure.” Nor does it square with the actual contentof the notion of tradition as practice, which, as he develops it, is a socialtheory in which the traditional concerns of identity, selfhood, and intelli-gibility are understood in terms of social interaction (especially 1986a and1986b).Many of the key issues that the later papers address are contained

in his 1962 paper “A Mistake about Causality in Social Science,” which,I will show, was an important seed bed for his later thought.1 For theconcept of practices MacIntyre developed was itself a social theory: the“philosophical” conclusions are dependent on its validity as an accountof practices as a social phenomenon. This chapter focuses on a questionof philosophical or social theoretical method that bears on the merits ofthis theory, one of which is critical: the validity of a form of argumentthat figures throughout MacIntyre’s work, in which characterizations of atopic, “identifications,” are used to exclude alternative explanations. In the

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MacIntyre and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences 71

end, I will argue, arguments of this form are intrinsically misleading orincomplete.

1. THE FIFTIES

The technical philosophical problem at the core of MacIntyre’s early writ-ings was the problem of reasons and causes. Anthony Kenny later summa-rized the conventional account during this period as follows:

When we explain action in terms of desires and beliefs we are not puttingforward any explanatory theory to account for action. It is true that desiresand beliefs explain action; but the explanation is not of any causal hypo-thetical form. It is not as if the actions of human beings constitute a set ofraw data – actions identifiable on their faces as the kinds of actions theyare – for which we may seek an explanatory hypothesis. On the contrary,many human actions are not identifiable as actions of a particular kind un-less they are already seen and interpreted as proceeding from a particularset of desires and beliefs. (Kenny 1978, p. 12)

This account was the alternative to, and led to the discrediting of, theidea that “reasons explanations” were a variety of causal explanation. Rea-sons explanationswere descriptions in intentional language of a set of eventsthat the description connected. To be “identifiable as action,” in Kenny’slanguage, implied proceeding fromparticular sets of beliefs anddesires.Thereason the sets were “particular” was that the connection between them andthe actions that “proceeded” from them was not caused but logical: the be-liefs and desires were reasons for particular actions that also explained theactions. When MacIntyre later wrote of the stock of action descriptions ina society, he meant descriptions of what is “identifiable as action.”What is the status of these descriptions or identifications? An earlier tra-

dition, exemplified byWeber, had put them on the side of the interpretationof meaning, which was taken to be consistent with, and not exclude, causalexplanations. The key to the new account of action explanation was thatthey did. MacIntyre’s first major philosophy publication, “Determinism” inMind (1957a), vigorously upheld the claim that

to show that behavior is rational is enough to show that it is not causallydetermined in the sense of being the effect of a set of sufficient condi-tions operating independently of the agent’s deliberation or possibility ofdeliberation. So the discoveries of the physiologist and psychologist may

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indefinitely increase our knowledge of why men behave irrationally butthey could never show that rational behavior in this sense was causally de-termined. (MacIntyre 1957a, p. 35)

Even in the case of the hypnotized person, MacIntyre argued, only if thatperson acted in accordance with hypnotic suggestion “no matter how goodthe reasons we offered him” for doing otherwise could we claim that thebehavior was produced by the hypnosis (MacIntyre 1957a, p. 38). Reasonsexplanations, in short, are probative with respect to the truth of causalclaims, and, in the absence of unusual circumstances, exclude them: if actionis rational, it is not caused.2

MacIntyre’s first conventional philosophical book, The Unconscious(1958), was an attempt to extend the notion of intentional language andthe idea of description to account for another class of action explanationsthought to be causal, those involving the mechanisms of Freudian theory.He argued that Freud had misconstrued his own achievement by makingthem into a scientific theory and construing his explanations as dependenton the discovery of a new causal realm. Freud’s real achievement was largelya matter of extending intentional language to encompass unconscious mo-tivations. MacIntyre argued that Freud’s own causal construal of these ex-planations was a misinterpretation (Unconscious, pp. 71–74). MacIntyre didnot argue that the attempt to provide a causal, theoretical account of behav-ior was in principle mistaken: theorizing about unobservables is legitimate,and theorizing about the unconscious in the normal fashion of hypothetico-deductivism would be legitimate as well (Unconscious, p. 46). His questionis rather one that can be answered by an analysis of whether Freud’s expla-nations are in fact of this type, and the answer is that they are not. Freudthinks of his unconscious motives as causes, but “in practice, when Freudassigns an unconscious motive to an action he ascribes a purpose” ratherthan a cause, though a purpose which is inaccessible to the patient (Uncon-scious, p. 61). Thus in practice what Freud has extended into the realm of theunconscious is not causality but intentionality, and in his treatments “theadducing of logically relevant considerations plays an essential part” (Un-conscious, p. 36). Because the notion of unconscious intention is not causalit does not require the unconscious as a causal entity, and thus does notrequire causal theory (Unconscious, p. 96–97). Freud’s usages conceal this.“Repression,” for example, appears to be a causal concept, but it is not: itis a metaphor used for descriptive purposes (Unconscious, p. 79). The the-ory of the unconscious, understood as a scientific theory, was, MacIntyreargued, gratuitous, for the discovery of unconsciously motivated actions,


which MacIntyre accepted as an important achievement of psychoanalysis,did not require such a theory, nor did it require Freud’s complex causalmachinery of the mind. The case against the theory is thus an applicationof the standard account of theoretical entities in philosophy of science.Showing that Freud’s explanations can be construed in intentional terms

serves to show why the elaborate and highly questionable structure of men-tal entities in the theory are not required by the explanations he actuallygives.This is a formof the argument that identifying an action as intentionalexcludes the possibility of causal explanation, or theory, but it is differentfrom certain famous versions of this argument, a difference that is impor-tant throughout MacIntyre’s discussions of social theory. The differencefigures in the contrast between The Unconscious and Peter Winch’s The Ideaof a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. Each appeared in the sameyear, 1958, and in the same series of little red books (Routledge and KeganPaul’s “Studies in Philosophical Psychology”). Winch’s book was destinedto become a classic. In it, he boldly had extended the “reasons” side ofthe reasons and causes arguments by arguing that only those reasons thatwere part of an activity, part (to use MacIntyre’s language) of the stock ofdescriptions available to its participants, could figure in an explanation ofthe activity. This argument depended on the constitutive role of agents’concepts in the formation of the intention to perform a particular act. Thecharacter of these concepts precluded causal explanation, which requiredconcepts of a different type, suitable for generalization.Causal accounts of actions typically appeal to the notion that the ac-

tion can be described and categorized independently of the reasons of theagent. In an example that Winch took from Pareto, Christian baptism isdescribed as a lustral rite. Winch argued that this description was an error:the action thus described was falsely described because it was not the actionintended by the agents; the intended action was intended in the form ofthe Christian concept of baptism. An explanation of lustral rites does notexplain the actions of the believers because it is not a description of whatthey did in the strict sense ofmatching the conceptual content of the actionsas they were conceived by the participants.Winch’s book extended this lineof argument to other figures in the social sciences, showing that they fellafoul of the problem of the constitutive conceptual relationship betweenthe identification of actions and the content of the intentions of the agent.Winch drew the full implications of this argument, and they were radical.To explain the acts of Homeric heroes, or of believers in witchcraft, is toidentify the actions in their conceptual terms and then to explicate theirconcepts. In explaining by explicating concepts one comes to an end, and


this was, forWinch, also the end of social science, and its sole end. The goalof causal knowledge of the world of action, the goal of the social sciences,was incoherent, and social science properly understood was a branch ofphilosophy because it was a form of conceptual analysis.The tensions produced by this extension of the idea that reasons ex-

plain, and explain in some exclusive sense, are multiple and complex, andthey appear between MacIntyre and Winch even at this early point. Theargument that the concepts contained in intentions were constitutive ofaction fit problematically with the notion of rational action more narrowlyconstrued, asMacIntyre had construed it in “Determinism.” It was plausibleto define rational action in the strict sense of rational decision as uncaused,asMacIntyre did in his paper. ButMacIntyre’s argument there was very lim-ited in one respect: he did not identify any large, actual class of actions asrational according to his definition, and indeed, it would be consistent withhis argument in that text to claim that the content of the category of rationalaction was vanishingly small. The idea that “rational action” involved theadducing of reasons, which figures in The Unconscious and “Determinism,”was different and had different implications. Argument, like analysis, ispotentially interminable, and in any case raises questions about the ulti-mate grounds of argument. These questions had relativistic implications,since ultimate grounds for us might not be ultimate grounds for someoneelse. So did the idea suggested in Anscombe’s Intention (1957 [2000]) thatthe relevant “reasons”were practical syllogisms, an ideawhich in any case fitpoorly with the idea of rational decisionmaking. The “constitutivity” argu-ment went even further (Weber 1968 [1978], pp. 5–8, 17; see also Turnerand Factor 1994, p. 31). To define all action as uncaused by virtue of the factthat it is conceptualized by agents led to radical conclusions, conclusionsthat conflicted with the ordinary usage it purported to analyze.The link between intention and action, in ordinary usage, is some-

times weak, even if it is backed by practical syllogisms. Weakness of will,multiple relevant motives, and sheer inconsistency are features of humanaction. Here it does seem reasonable to ask what the real reason was foran act, something that reference to practical syllogisms does not answer,but “cause” might. The idea of ordinary usage, in any case, raises the ques-tion of whose ordinary usage. Some reasons explanations, especially thosein other cultures, seem to be, by our lights at least, systematically false,defective, or unintelligible: the beliefs behind the reasons are false, the cat-egories in which they are expressed (such as Aristotle’s categories of foodtypes) are defective, and the cosmologies which underwrite the categoriesare little better than superstitious gibberish. Even the basic inferencesmade


by agents in these societies (inferences we can apprehend them as making,and even supply the “rules” by which they are made) are not “reasons” forus. Do these reasons explanations – which undeniably are constitutive ofthe intentions of the agents – count as adequate explanations, or as genuinereasons? Is “of course, he is warding off evil spirits” an explanation? Thisis not as simple a problem as it appears.In the first place, this argument creates a problem with the implications

that MacIntyre drew from his discussion of rational action. There, verystrong truth-claims are being made for the significance of reasons descrip-tions – claims to the effect that giving a reasons explanation warrants claimsabout causation – negative claims, claims to the effect that some action wasnot caused because it was done for a reason. If we accept that a pure, ra-tional decision is by virtue of its character uncaused, does this extend morebroadly to any action constituted by an intention? Is it really the case thatpsychologists could discover nothing that had any bearing on, for example,the reasoning involved in the practice of ancient Mayan kings of bleedingtheir genitals in public, or the actions of criminals, or reasoning about sex-ual desire, or crowd behavior? This is implausible in the extreme – in effect,it amounts to the claim that social science is unexplanatory gibberish butthe practical syllogisms of believers in witchcraft are genuinely explana-tory; that ordinary historical explanations of such things as the causes ofthe GreatWar were impossible in principle, and that history as practiced byhistorians was therefore bunk; and that comparisons between institutionswere inadmissible, for they violated the constitutivity principle. MacIntyrebelieved none of this. Indeed, he served as a kind of go-between, continu-ing to attempt to make the claims of philosophers square with the claimsof social scientists. For example, his 1960 paper “Purpose and IntelligentAction” attempts to make sense of the notion of intelligent action in a waythat fits both the concept of action and the results of intelligence testingresearch. The large problem of the relation of social science explanationsto intentional action was still there to be solved.

2. MACINTYRE CONTRA WEBER ON RATIONALITY

MacIntyre’s first major paper on social science itself was “A Mistake aboutCausality in Social Science,” published in 1962. It represented an extensionof the strategy of “Determinism” and The Unconscious to this larger prob-lem, and to a figure with whomMacIntyre continued to wrestle throughouthis career – MaxWeber. The “mistake” to which the title refers is Weber’s.


Weber had constructed historical explanations of beliefs, such as the par-ticular “economic ethic” that he described under the rubric of “the spirit ofcapitalism,” by constructing a causal account of the nature of the influenceof certain other kinds of ideas, namely the ideas of vocation, predestination,and worldliness that were a part of Calvinistic Protestantism. The explana-tion as formulated byWeber himself is causal, and this is part of themistake.It depends on the claim that there is a distinctive psychological connectinglink, namely a state of anxiety in the minds of believers, that supplies whatWeber thought was the distinctive motive force for capitalist activity of anew kind, in conformity with the novel “ethic” he identified.Herewas an explanation, or apparent explanation, rich in the kind of dif-

ficulty that a serious application of the reasons and causes distinction neededto address. It carried with it other intriguing baggage of special relevance toMacIntyre:Weber’s account of capitalism had been routinely treated, in the1950s, as the counterpoint to, and refutation of, the “materialist” view ofcapitalism and of history generally. The conclusion of Weber’s account ofthe historical course of rationalization had an even more interesting setof implications. His argument that Calvinistic Protestantism represented arationalization of the Christian tradition was a natural counterpart to theconclusions reached by such Protestant theologians as Karl Barth, whomMacIntyre had other reasons for attacking. ForWeber, in the course of theprocess of rationalization, of which the “disenchantment of the world” wasa consequence, the “superstitious” elements of the Christian tradition weregradually stripped away.MacIntyre does with Weber something similar to what he did with

Freud: he reconstructs Weber’s explanation by turning it into a pure issueof rationality and contradiction, thus dispensing with the need for cause.WhereWeber interpreted the early Protestants as being caught in the gripof a consistent theodicy that had anxiety as a consequence and that had thefurther causal consequence of strongly reinforcing a particular pattern ofreasoning, the “ethic,” MacIntyre saw them as in the grip of a theologi-cal contradiction, which they resolved rationally. The two lines of argu-ment can be compared very simply. For Calvin and for a rational Calvinist,the recognition of God’s omniscient and omnipotence not only posed theusual problem of the existence of evil, the traditional problem of theodicy,but posed it in a very particular form. The revelatory writings taught thatthere was heaven and hell, and it followed from this that some people weredamned, or going to hell, and other people were saved, or going to heaven.We as humans do not have knowledge of whether we are going to heaven orhell, whereas God, being omniscient, knows in advance. This is the basis of


the doctrine of predestination. It could be that God grants us free will, andit could also be that we in some sense are allowed by God to earn salvationthrough the doing of good works. But this “allowing” and “earning” is inthe end essentially a sham, simply because God in his omniscience alreadyknows who will be saved by their “good works.”3 In the end, our salvationis entirely a matter of God’s grace; we cannot earn it on our own, and cer-tainly not by good works. ForWeber this was the transparent consequenceof making the Christian theodicy consistent, and it had a predictable causaleffect: believers had a deep anxiety about whether they were predestined toelection or damnation.MacIntyre ran this argument the other way around. Good works, he

argued, were enjoined in the revelatory writings. Protestant theology thuswas placed in the untenable position of arguing that what the revelatorywritings commanded was in some sense irrelevant to God and God’s na-ture (which they supposed themselves to have theological access to throughtheir own theorizing). This contradiction between theology and revelationcould only mean that the Calvinists were mistaken about God’s nature andthat Protestantism was a false doctrine. They found a way out of this con-tradiction by embracing the notion of good works in practice while denyingit in theory.4 Thus, contra Weber, it is Protestantism rather than Catholi-cism that arises out of irrationality and contradiction. The consequences ofthis contradiction, and people’s response to it, is thus explained not throughthe kindof psychologicalmechanism thatWeber invokes but rather throughthe logical fact of contradiction – something that occurs at the level of be-lief, and also needs no further explanation, because it is “rational” to resolvethe contradiction.MacIntyre’s argument is relentless in placing his historical account on

the reasons rather than the causes side of the line. “The relationship which[Weber] in fact manages to pinpoint is indeed a rational one. Weber in factpresents us with capitalist actions as the conclusion of a practical syllogismwhich has Protestant premises” (MacIntyre 1962, p. 55). Weber’s concernwith causal alternatives – the cases of India and China – “is entirely outof place” (MacIntyre 1962, p. 55). The statistical material Weber presentsis relevant, but only in that it shows that there were people whose behav-ior corresponded to the practical syllogism – that is to say, people whoconformed to the description. The fact of conformity to the descriptionis sovereign, and causally probative: because it is rational to resolve thecontradiction as MacIntyre constructs the practical syllogism there are nocausal facts of the matter. The “mistake” supposedly made by Weber, andby social scientists more generally, is to think otherwise.


This is an application of the claim MacIntyre made in “Determinism,”but one for which we can see how much might fall into the category ofrational action. The sharp line MacIntyre draws in that text between be-having irrationally and behaving rationally, in which rational behavior isthe case in which the agent would change the course of action if and only if“logically relevant considerations” were adduced, now is extended to an ex-ample that ismore realistic – the case in which the agent has various reasons,and the determinants that select what the operative reasons are from theseavailable reasons may be (and were hypothesized by Weber to be) condi-tions, such as anxiety, that are unlike “reasons” or “information,” the termsMacIntyre uses in “Determinism” (MacIntyre 1957a, p. 35). MacIntyre’sresponse was to acknowledge the problem of inconsistency between beliefsand actions itself. Real human action rarely works as neatly as the simplerelation between a belief, a good, and an action modeled in the practicalsyllogism “Dry food suits any man,” “here’s some dry food”→ the actionof eating it (MacIntyre 1962, p. 53). But the model does solve a problem. Itaccounts for the constitutive or “internal and conceptual” character of theintention-action relationship. The idea that practical syllogisms providedlogical backing for the intention-action link allowed MacIntyre to assim-ilate action explanations to the decision-oriented model of rational actionin “Determinism.” This avoided the claim that action was shown to be un-caused simply by virtue of the fact that it was conceptually constituted. Italso allowed him to make sense of the problem of false practical syllogisms.He argued that we can imagine a dialogue with the practical syllogizer inwhich the beliefs of the agent can be revealed, and the false ones corrected.When the subject in this dialogue “insists on simply affirming the premisesand denying the conclusion, he becomes unintelligible: we literally do notknow in the one case what he is saying or in the other case what he is doing”(MacIntyre 1962, p. 53). The use of “intelligible” is telling, for it persists –twenty-four years later MacIntyre was still wrestling with the notion ofintelligibility (MacIntyre 1986a). Here, the later conclusions are foreshad-owed. This style of explanations comes to an end not in concepts but in theintelligible agent.Weber’s explanation had singled out one strand of the plethora of de-

sires, beliefs, and decisions that early capitalists made, and tried to explainwhy this strand proved to be so causally significant. This was a question thatMacIntyre’s approach could not address, except through the insistence thatthe strand of reasoning he described was the only possible account, giventhe evidence, rather than a possible account among others, that evidencewould decide between.


One may observe again here a characteristic of MacIntyre’s style – hisreliance on a particular kind of winner-take-all reasoning – which we maycharacterize as “exclusive identification.”Hehimself characterizes this formof argument, in a different context in the same paper, by saying that “whatI have been concerned to do is to identify rather than to explain. But if oneaccepts this identification then we will have to take out a widely acceptedclass of explanations” (MacIntyre 1962, p. 69). The new context is the prob-lem of alternative conceptual schemes, and here we see MacIntyre attemptfor the first time to provide a systematic alternative to Winch. MacIntyre’sapproach concedes one ofWinch’s points about the conceptual constitutionof action, that “if the limits of action are the limits of description, then toanalyze the ideas current in society is also to discern the limits within whichaction necessarily moves in that society” (MacIntyre 1962, p. 60), fromwhich he draws the conclusion that “the theory of ideology appears not asone more compartmentalized concept of the sociologist, but as part of hiscentral concern with society as such” (MacIntyre 1962, p. 60). However,consistent with his earlier accounts of rational action as action open to theadduction of reasons, he argues that the descriptions in the stock of descrip-tions available in a given social group at a given time “occur as constituentsof beliefs, speculations, and projects and as these are continually criticized,modified, rejected, or improved, the stock of descriptions changes. Thechanges in human action are thus intimately linked to the thread of ratio-nal criticism in history” (MacIntyre 1962, p. 60). This approach in turnbecomes the distinction between two types of ideology.One is represented by the Azande, who had been discussed by Michael

Polanyi in his magnum opus Personal Knowledge, also published in 1958.The Azande were striking for having had a conceptual system in whichwitchcraft beliefs were central, and which had ad hoc answers to any ev-idence that might be given against it, and was thus closed to criticism.MacIntyre claims that in primitive societies closure is characteristic: “theyhave their concepts and beliefs; they move in a closed conceptual circle”(MacIntyre 1962, p. 63). But while “[a]ll primitive societies, especially iso-lated ones, tend to be closed . . . [m]ost later societies are open; there areestablished modes of criticism” (MacIntyre 1962, p. 63). MacIntyre drawsthe line between “open” and “closed” in such a way that Marxism is not aclosed scheme, but Stalinism was. The difference is that Stalinism repre-sented “a concerted attempt to delimit the available stock of concepts andbeliefs and at a certain point to return to a closed circle” (MacIntyre 1962,p. 63). We can distinguish the two kinds of case because for Stalinism clo-sure can be accomplished only by recourse to irrational devices that exclude


rational alternatives. Closure, in short, can occur “rationally” only for prim-itive societies that have never known openness, but elsewhere closure mustbe forced, or irrationally induced. This is an intriguing move, in light ofwhat follows, not least because it suggests that “ideology” always has an actof “irrationality” in its historical pedigree. MacIntyre argued that Stalin’sterror, which could “remove physically all traces of alternative” arguments,was necessitated by the fact that ideological closure is not possible in amodern industrial society. Even in Stalin’s Soviet Union there were theOld Bolshevists, “who in their own theories and practices, were the bearersof an alternative wider conceptual scheme (it is in the light of our canonsof rationality that we can see it as wider), which prevented consciousnessbeing closed to non-Stalinist alternatives” (MacIntyre 1962, p. 68). Terror,he thought, is bound to fail, even though in Stalinist terms “the whole thingis rational; it can only be challenged by leaving this closed circle” of ideas(MacIntyre 1962, pp. 68–69). This “identification” of Stalinism as rationalon its own terms meant that classes of explanation that appealed to suchnotions as “cult of personality” are wrong (MacIntyre 1962, p. 69). Butit did not mean that it was immune to explanation, since the devices thatsustained it are irrational by our standards.

3. ENTER KUHN

The cultural tsunami that was Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolu-tions (1962) was published in the same year as “A Mistake about Causalityin Social Science.” Kuhn’s argument maps on to the problem of the Azandeas follows: science is like a primitive society in that its concepts also move,for long periods of time, in a closed circle. Anomalies are dismissed, justas they are by the Azande, with ad hoc explanations – of the failures of theoracles, for the Azande, and of unexplained but possibly relevant results,for scientists within their paradigm. The rational alternatives to the existingparadigms that emerge are treated by scientists not with openness but withendless attempts to exclude them from serious discussion. These attemptsseem irrational only in retrospect, once a scientific revolution has occurredand replaced the previous closed system with a new one. The revolutionitself is not and cannot be a matter of rationally considering alternatives, atleast if they are fundamental alternatives, because the only relevant “ratio-nal” criteria are internal to the closed system of concepts. In this respectscientists are in the same position as the Azande. There is no such thingin the history of science as an explanation to the effect that some belief


is true or rational simply because it is true or rational. It is only true orrational according to our standards or theirs, and there is no way of ex-plaining our standards as rational – to say they are rational simply becausethey are is itself an instance of reasoning within a closed circle of concepts.The open/closed distinction is a sham, or perhaps it would be better to saya relative distinction, that operates internally to a system of concepts, notbetween them. The only way out of a paradigm was a “revolution” thatcould not be construed as rational in the past paradigm, and converselythe past paradigm could not be properly understood in the language ofthe new.MacIntyre’s discussions of Stalinism and the Azande, his insistence on

the conceptually relative character of action-explanations as always rationaland always restricted to the “stock of descriptions” in the explainee’s society,his apparent equation of our standards of rationality with rationality as such,his invocation of Popper’s distinction between open and closed, and hisdepiction of Stalinism as an attempt to secure closure, all read in retrospectlike a man walking into a trap.MacIntyre argued that “the beginning of an explanation of why certain

criteria are taken to be rational in some societies is that they are ratio-nal.” Presumably he meant that “our” society was among these societies,for in the next sentence he adds: “And since this has to enter into ourexplanation we cannot explain social behavior independently of our ownnorms of rationality” (MacIntyre 1962, p. 61). MacIntyre characterized theprocess of changing someone’s views by argument as follows: “I appeal toimpersonal canons of rationality and the relationship between us can onlybe elucidated by an account of the established features of rule-following”(MacIntyre 1962, p. 68). This suggests that he thought at this time thatimpersonal standards of rationality were universal, their application gov-erned by locally established procedures of rule-following. He might haveavoided making such an assumption simply by leaving out the notion of“criteria” of rationality or the idea that we have “our own norms of ratio-nality.” Instead, by making an unargued identification of “our own normsof rationality” with rationality as suchMacIntyre opened the door to the fullform of the puzzle of rationality and relativism: appealing to “our norms”makes the explanations explanations for us; appealing to rationality as suchraises the question of howwe are to affirm our criteria of rationality withoutcircularity.The term “paradigm” included the notion of a rational standard among

its multiple meanings, and Kuhn’s discussion made it clear that whenscientists made substantive judgments of rational adequacy of evidence,


and of whether an anomaly was significant in science, they relied onparadigms. Within paradigms justification was circular – evidence sup-ported the paradigm, but the paradigm defined what counted as evidence;paradigms were validated by explanatory and predictive successes, but theydefined what counted as explanation and what success amounted to. ButKuhn’s case was historiographic and historical: for him incommensurabilitywas simply a fact, shown by the reactions of incomprehension of scientistsadhering the old paradigm in the face of the new paradigm. Moreover, ac-cording to Kuhn, what MacIntyre in this paper characterized as unusualand “slightly self-contradictory” (MacIntyre 1962, p. 63) about ideologicalthinking, namely the attempt to close the circle of concepts, to “prevent anycriticism which does not fall inside the established conceptual framework”is what scientists normally do in the course of solidifying the triumph of aparadigm and dealing with anomalies.The naive idea that divergence in conceptual schemes was error, that

there was unproblematic progress with respect to rationality, or truth, inthe course of the replacement of conceptual schemes or in the comparisonof divergence schemes, validated by personal canons, was over with Kuhn.For better or worse, this was a cultural transformation to whichMacIntyre,and every other thinker of the era, was compelled to respond.To fail to do sowould lead to a relativism in which Stalinism was merely another paradigmwith its own rationality, and in which our judgments about the nonrational-ity of itsmethods of self-justification or closurewould bemerely expressionsof “our” paradigm.The distinction between ideology and rational adequacywould collapse. Reasons explanations of action would be explanations onlyfor us. But vindicating “our” standards faced its own problems. A claim thatthe explanation of the fact that certain criteria are taken to be rational byus is that they are rational would simply be circular – a justification of ourstandards by reference to our standards. The Azande and Stalin could saythe same.

4. WINCH’S NEW CHALLENGE

MacIntyre had no wish to escape from this problem, which, in variousguises, was to be the central subject of his later career. Winch posed a newproblem, a problem of the logical conditions of understanding.Winch nowargued that there could never be grounds for judgments of rationality ofthe beliefs of other cultures, no matter how outre the beliefs, because suchjudgments about beliefs seemnecessarily to involve pressing the concepts in


question where they would not naturally be taken and thus misconstruingthem. The case was the now familiar Azande. The facts of the matter,reported by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, were these. The Azande employed aparticular method for answering a wide variety of questions. They askeda question that could be given a yes or no answer while they poisoned asmall domestic fowl. If the bird lived, the answer was “yes”; if the bird died,the answer was “no.” The method was used for making decisions but alsofor answering causal questions such as: “Is Prince Ndoruma responsible forplacing badmedicines in the roof of my hut?” (Winch 1970, p. 86). Oracles,however, can conflict: the implications of the oracular pronouncements areoften inconsistent with one another, and future experiences do not alwayssquare with predictions. Witch powers were supposed by the Azande tobe hereditary, so discovering through the oracle that someone is a witchimplied that the person’s whole family line are witches. But other oraclesmight, and do, contradict this by answering “no” to the question of whethera given person is a witch. The Azande supplied various explanations for thefailure of oracles; for example, that a bad poison was used or the ritualwas faulty. These ad hoc explanations were, as the Europeans who studiedthemunderstood, not sufficient to overcome the endless contradictions thatbelief in oracles produced.The way in which Evans-Pritchard had described the Azande involves a

basic principle of logic, the principle of noncontradiction, that had figuredamong MacIntyre’s “impersonal canons of rationality.” But it is not clear,as Winch points out, that Evans-Pritchard is entitled to do so in this case.Evans-Pritchard’s challenge is first to understand the concepts of the Azandeand that judgments about contradiction seem to depend on correct under-standing. Our understanding of concepts is first a matter of understandinghow they are used. In the case of the Azande, as Evans-Pritchard himselftells us, the people who engage in the practice of oracles do not have anyinterest in the problem of contradiction, or indeed any theoretical interestin the subject. For Winch, this suggests that there is no mystery about thecontradictory character of Azande thinking, only an error that creates afalse problem. It is the interpreter, Evans-Pritchard, who is in error, and hiserror is conceptual: he wishes to use the concepts in ways that the Azandedo not use them. Evans-Pritchard is guilty of attributing to the Azande aconcept other than the one they use. Pushing the concept into uses thatare unnatural to the Azande, to the point of contradiction, is the same asmisconstruing the concept, and the appearance of contradictions in a re-construction of their thought shows no more than that the reconstructionis faulty.


So Evans-Pritchard failed to understand the Azande, and consequentlyfailed to describe their mode of thought. This seems to mean that under-standing these concepts precludes judgments about their beliefs and asser-tions about the rationality of these beliefs, and that, in the case of conceptsthat figure in developed forms of life, to make a claim that the conceptsare “irrational” amounts to misunderstanding them as they are used by theparticipants in that form of life, where in fact their use in practice does notlead to collapse in the way that a contradiction leads to the collapse of atheory. In short, claims about the “rationality” of other cultures or theircontents are inevitably misdirected – directed at a false reconstruction ofthe concepts of the other culture rather than the concepts as the people ofthe culture employ them. MacIntyre began promptly and explicitly to ex-tricate himself from the trap created byWinch’s arguments by abandoningsome of his earlier arguments and acknowledging some previous, unac-knowledged conflicts. The strong version of the constitutivity argument,with which MacIntyre flirted in 1962 (cf. esp. MacIntyre 1962, pp. 60–62),it was now evident, had relativistic implications: if identification of actionwas explanation, and identification could only be on the terms of the societyin question, we would be limited to these explanations; rational criticism,whichMacIntyre had then thought allowed freedom from these limitations,did not escape the circle of local concepts; the exclusion of all other explana-tions of action meant that we are deprived of any means to account for theirbeliefs. To say that Stalin’s methods were irrational was not merely to applyour standards of rationality, but to misunderstand his. Appealing to imper-sonal canons assumes understanding; showing his beliefs are contradictoryshows we have not understood.MacIntyre’s new approach appears in his papers “The Idea of a Social

Science” and “Rationality and the Explanation of Action,” both of whichhe included in Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971). Each of these was inlarge part a commentary onWinch.MacIntyre now argued that the reasonsand causes distinction was overdrawn, and that his previous view of the sig-nificance of some of the key arguments in the reasons and causes literaturewas mistaken: “we shall be in conceptual error if we look in the directionof the causes of the physical movements involved in the performance ofthe actions. It does not follow that there is no direction in which it mightbe fruitful to search for antecedent events that might function as causes”(MacIntyre 1967a, p. 200; see also p. 215).5

The hypnosis example reappears, now to make a novel point, againstWinch’s use of the identification argument.MacIntyre now argues that pos-sessing a reason, which is what the identification establishes, is not enough


for explanation – possessing a reasonmay be a state of affairs identifiable in-dependently of the performance of the action. Recall that in “Determinism”MacIntyre had used the example in support of the claim that the agent’s ac-tion in this case was not “rational behavior” and that “to show that behavioris rational is enough to show that it is not causally determined in the senseof being the effect of a set of sufficient conditions operating independentlyof the agent’s deliberation or possibility of deliberation” (MacIntyre 1957a,p. 35). In the case of the hypnotized person, it is causally determined, andconsequently considerations of rationality do not apply. In the later paper,the issue is whether a given reason is “causally effective,” and this is a ques-tion that presupposes that the hypnotized subject possesses a reason, butone that is not the cause of the action. In this case the question of whetherthe reason caused the action “depends on what causal generalizations wehave been able to establish” (MacIntyre 1967a, p. 117). So Weber, it nowappears, was correct in his methodological self-conception, at least in thisrespect: the question of whether a particular belief is the cause of a particularaction is not a category mistake.In the passage in which MacIntyre connects the problem of reasons to

the problem of the status of nonrelative social science concepts he is stillconcerned to vindicate the notion that there can be cross-cultural general-izations, a commitment he soon curtailed. But he also has his eye on twoother issues that had figured in “A Mistake about Causality in Social Sci-ence” (1962): the problem of explaining the change from one set of beliefsto another, and the problem of false consciousness, whichMacIntyre under-stands in this context to be a form of the problem of error about the actualcauses of one’s actions as distinct from the rationalizations one providesfor them, as well as the problem of erroneous belief, such as the witchcraftbeliefs in the time of King James and among the Azande. The problemhere was whether rationality, the criteria of rationality of a society, falsity inthe sense of false consciousness, and coherence, to list a few of MacIntyre’sfavorite usages, could be extricated from the closed circle of concepts orwere simply part of the circle. The problem was not Kuhn’s or Winch’salone, nor was it merely a matter of the philosophy of social science.MacIntyre now addressed it in the form of religion and the familiarChristian puzzle, known as Tertullian’s paradox, that understanding wasa precondition of belief but belief was a precondition of understanding,which he turned on its head in a surprising way.The argument of “Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believ-

ing?” (1970) starts with the religious form of the problem of incommensura-bility: are the skeptic and the believers talking about the same thing? Or, as


some Protestants would say, is it that the skeptic has not rejected Christian-ity, but instead failed to understand it, and thus rejected something else?This latter argument depends on a strong notion of understanding thatimplies acceptance, or at least “sharing.” But, as MacIntyre notes, “anthro-pologists and sociologists routinely claim to understand concepts they donot share.They identify such concepts asmana, or taboo, without themselvesusing them – or so it seems” (MacIntyre 1970, p. 64). The problems areparallel, and also, MacIntyre shows, so are the solutions: anthropologistswind up with various approaches that parallel positions in the philosophy ofreligion. The key case is again Evans-Pritchard, whoseNuer Religion (1956)describes the concept of kwoth, and, as MacIntyre puts it, by identifying therules governing its use in a “social context of practice” is “able to show thatthe utterances . . . are rule-governed” (MacIntyre 1970, p. 65). MacIntyre’spoint is that while this enables him to “show us what the Nuer idea of in-telligibility is” and “why the Nuer think their religion makes sense . . . thisis not to have shown the Nuer are right” (MacIntyre 1970, p. 65).Can we judge intelligibility, incoherence, and so forth independently

of the Nuer – or alternatively the Christian believer – and arrive at theconclusion that their beliefs do notmake sense?Or is this necessarily to havefailed to understand them, as Winch supposed? If the idea of one overallnorm of intelligibility is a metaphysical fiction, is the only alternative totalrelativism? The point was of course at the core of philosophical discussiongenerally in the last quarter of the twentieth century, so it is all the morestriking that, on the page followingMacIntyre’s elaboration of this problem,he appeals to Franz Steiner’s discussion of taboo.6

The point MacIntyre makes against Winch in elaborating the problemis that “criteria have a history,” which bears directly on “the suggestion thatagreement in following a rule is sufficient to make sense” (MacIntyre 1970,p. 68). Taboo, it appears, is a concept that we can provide rules for using, butcannot, at least on the basis of current usage, make meaningful, intelligible,rational, and so forth (MacIntyre 1970, p. 68). On the basis of present usagealone, we might say that taboos are prohibitions where no further reasonexists, and as he jokes, “the temptation to tell anthropologists that taboo isthe name of a non-natural quality would be very strong for any Polynesianwho had read G. E. Moore” (MacIntyre 1970, p. 68). Steiner’s solution, asMacIntyre construes it, is to say that taboo formerly didmake sense, but thatthe usages recorded by anthropologists no longer do. As MacIntyre putsit, Steiner has “constructed from the uses of taboo a sense which it mighthave had and a possible history of how this sense was lost” (MacIntyre 1970,p. 68). With this phrase, one sees the key insight of A Short History of Ethics


and ahead to After Virtue and the rest of the later project. Where does itleave uswith religion?Aswith ethics, wemust accept the realization that ourtroubles with our concepts in the present are a matter of their separationfrom embodied social practice and from the history in which they madesense. In the case of religion it leads to MacIntyre’s novel conclusion thatChristians don’t understand the religion they profess. Barthian theologians,G. E. Moore, and taboo thinkers are in the end no different.Steiner’s account of taboo is one inwhich something intelligible, namely

the sense of the dangers of things and places, turns into something unintel-ligible – apparently pointless prohibitions – which can be understood onlyby constructing its historical origins in the context of which it is intelligi-ble. The trope recurs in MacIntyre’s thought in many forms, notably in theproblem of morality in A Short History of Ethics, which accounts for moraltheory as a means of making sense of substantive moral notions whose orig-inal moral context of social practice has disappeared. Thus, with Stoicism,for which virtues that made a particular kind of sense in a social order inwhich practicing these virtues had visibly good results, in the disorderedpublic world of the Roman Empire, had to be practiced, if they were prac-ticed at all, without regard to consequences, as purely private virtues – anotion that would have been oxymoronic for Aristotle (Short History,pp. 100–109). Here we see Steiner’s basic strategy brilliantly applied: tomake sense of the Stoics, it is not enough to find intelligible analoguesbetween their beliefs and beliefs in our own culture that are already in-telligible to us. As a matter of interpretation this may be sufficient; as amatter of history it is not – history, in this case the history of moral ideasand moral philosophy, would become a parade of bizarre inventions. Whatis needed is a rational reconstruction of the irrational that makes the in-ventions intelligible as attempted solutions to real problems at the level ofideas – problems such as what the authoritative basis of morality might bein the face of diversity in practice – and existential problems, such as howone can use power in a violent and disordered society in which acting onold ideas of decency produces defeat and suffering.The same kind of arguments cannot of course apply to science, or to

any ongoing tradition of inquiry in which coherence is not lost. But thesetoo “have a history” and, in these cases, a certain kind of history has a cru-cial role. This is the argument against Kuhn that MacIntyre deployed in“Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Sci-ence” (1977a). The article deals with the issue of commensurability, whichhad been critical to the philosophical impact of Kuhn. Paul Feyerabend,in 1962, published a lengthy paper in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy


of Science III that made the issues very explicit: the traditional account oftheoretical advance involved subsuming old theories under new ones, andthis required meaning invariance – that is, that the terms had the samemeaning in both theories. Feyerabend argued that they did not. Without alogical account of the connection between theories, the “logical” analysis oftheory changewas doomed, and soon unraveled. The “revolutions” accountpresented by Kuhn implied that successive paradigms were not strictu sensuabout the same things. But scientists thought their theories were, and alsothat they were advances.MacIntyre argued that the scientists’ historical accounts, narratives of

scientific change, were themselves part of science properly understood, andthat the value of a theory in science depends on, and is shown by, its role innarratives of progress.

The criterion of a successful theory is that it enables us to understandits predecessors in a newly intelligible way. It, at one and the same time,enables us to understand precisely why its predecessors have to be rejectedor modified and also why, without and before its illumination, past theorycould have remained credible. It introduces new standards for evaluating thepast. It recasts the narrativewhich constitutes the continuous reconstructionof the scientific tradition. (MacIntyre 1977a, p. 460)

5. TRADITION

Tradition, continuously reconstructed by narrative, was MacIntyre’s solu-tion to the puzzle of rational continuity in Kuhn. The question of whether“only standards to which anyone can appeal in judging what is a good andwhat is not are the standards embodied in the ordinary language of eachparticular group” (1992a, p. 18) was left to be solved. Whether MacIntyresolves them or exacerbates them is a matter of dispute: Winch believedhe did not solve them (Winch 1992). There is, however, another questionthat arises, on MacIntyre’s own terms, about the status of this account oftradition in its aspect of social theory, and this is a question that may bemore fruitful. The concept of the scientific tradition was associated withMichael Polanyi, and MacIntyre was at pains to distinguish his views fromPolanyi’s. For MacIntyre, “what constitutes a tradition is a conflict of inter-pretations of that tradition, a conflict which itself has a history susceptibleof rival interpretations. If I am a Jew, I have to recognize that the tradi-tion of Judaism is partly constituted by continuous argument over what


it means to be a Jew” (MacIntyre 1977a, p. 460). Similarly for science.Degenerate traditions, in contrast, erect “epistemological defenses whichenable [them] to avoid being put into question by rival traditions.” LiberalProtestantism, some forms of psychoanalysis, and modern astrology areexamples (MacIntyre 1977a, p. 461). Psychoanalysis, Marxism, astrology,all are Polanyi’s examples as well, as is the argument that “any feature ofany tradition, any theory, any practice, any belief can always under certainconditions be put in question, the practice of putting in question, whetherwithin a tradition or between traditions, itself always requires the contextof a tradition” (MacIntyre 1977a, pp. 461–462; Polanyi 1958, pp. 269–297).If we are to acceptMacIntyre’s account as the best or only account, we needgrounds to do so – grounds that rule out rivals, or show their inferiority. Inthe smaller intellectual space of theories of tradition, there are alternatives,and MacIntyre has a case against them. To understand the case we mustunderstand the rivals. Polanyi, according to MacIntyre, erred because

he does not see the omnipresence of conflict – sometimes latent – withinliving traditions. It is because of this that anyone who took Polanyi’s viewwould find it very difficult to explain how a transition might be made fromone tradition to another or how a tradition which had lapsed into incoher-ence might be reconstructed. Since reason operates only within traditionsand communities according to Polanyi, such a transition or reconstructioncould not be a work of reason. It would have to be a leap in the dark of somekind. (MacIntyre 1977a, p. 465, emphasis in the original)

Natural science can be a rational form of enquiry if and only if the writingof a true dramatic narrative – that is, of history understood in a particularway – can be a rational activity. Scientific reason turns out to be subordinateto, and intelligible only in terms of, historical reason. (MacIntyre 1977a,pp. 464)

Michael Oakeshott’s “Rationalism in Politics” was published in 1948.It is striking that the example of Stoicism was discussed, in largely thesame terms and in the same way as MacIntyre, by Oakeshott in the latetwenties (Cowling 1980, p. 253). Michael Polanyi published Science, Faithand Society in 1946, Personal Knowledge in 1956, and in between publisheda stream of articles and commentary. T. S. Eliot’s Christianity and Culture(1949) defended a notion of the European tradition as essentially Christian.One of the major themes of several of these works was the rehabilitation ofthe contribution of medieval Catholicism to the forming of this tradition.Christopher Dawson, editor of the Dublin Review, wrote The Making ofChristian Europe (1932) and engaged closely with the London scene. Even


such figures as Popper were briefly caught in this current. His paper“Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition” appeared in 1949.MacIntyre’s comments on this tradition are infrequent but interesting,

and they cluster in the late seventies though Popper’s article was mentionedin 1962 (MacIntyre 1977a, pp. 465–466, 468; 1978b, pp. 26–27). He hadbeen caustic about Polanyi, whom he considered to be a Burkean, a termMacIntyre used to designate a kind of conservatism that was the intellectualanalogue of Stalinism – a concept of tradition that was closed and “unitary.”Onemay observe that this comment is misplaced as applied to Polanyi, whomade the point that the relevant cultural ideal was “a highly differentiatedintellectual life pursued collectively” (Polanyi 1962, p. 219), “a continuousnetwork – of critics” (Polanyi 1962, p. 217). Similarly for the tradition oftradition as a whole: T. S. Eliot argued that too much unity was a bad thing(Eliot 1949, p. 131).Oakeshott would have argued that the notion of closureas applied to tradition is a capitulation to the French Revolution’s notionof tradition that the tradition tradition rejects. Indeed, it may be the casethat the notion of unity in this tradition is weaker than MacIntyre’s own.Others have pursued the question of the similarity betweenMacIntyre’s

concept of tradition and its rivals (for example, Flett 1999–2000). Themorepressing question is one of method. Given that there are rivals, and that atleast one of these rivals, MacIntyre’s, presents itself as not only different butsuperior, how are we to assess this claim? Here we come to a small puzzle.MacIntyre himself employs a variety of standards, depending on what sortof claim is being assessed, and in his relatively rare remarks on alternativeconcepts of tradition there are two kinds of argument. One, to which I willreturn, is an identification that excludes alternatives. The other is to assessthe theory, as any other theory in science or social science is assessed, to seewhether it accounts adequately for the appearances it is designed to accountfor without adding too much problematic baggage.The concept of practices (for example, in After Virtue, pp. 187–203) is

a straightforward example of a theoretical deployment: it is a theoreticalentity posited to account for various features of human activity. It is sup-ported by its consilience with other things that are known about humanactivity, with what is known about human psychology, and so forth. Wecan ask the usual questions about these theoretical entities in the usual way.These are not, for MacIntyre, questions from outside. His own writings,fromTheUnconscious to his writings on social science in the eighties, provideample grounds for holding him to this test. He argues that it could not havebeen known a priori that the project of Durkheim and of positivist sociologywould fail (MacIntyre 1986b, p. 92). And this means that nothing a priori


guarantees the validity of alternatives, either. Philosophy is not autonomousin this respect: philosophical doctrine can be evaluated only as contributingto specific inquiries (MacIntyre 1986b, p. 87).It will seem like an evasion to say that an assessment of MacIntyre’s ap-

proach to tradition, or that of any of his rivals, in these terms is not a simplematter. The problem is tangled up with some of the central mysteries ofpresent thought, notably the problem of normativity – of whether thereis such a thing to be explained, and what would count as an explanation.The problem of theoretical baggage is largely a problem relative to this.The features of MacIntyre’s account, its teleology and its doctrine ofinternal goods, which are shared with some other accounts of tradition andconstitute its heaviest pieces of baggage, are there because of it. I do notpropose to solve it here. But I will observe that a crucial kind of argumentin MacIntyre, “identification,” which leads to the exclusion of alternativesmight be taken as an alternative to theweighing of theoretical baggage, bothas an approach to vindicating MacIntyre or to interpreting his own argu-ments for his concept of practice and tradition. I question whether this isa form of argument at all, or at least a complete one: identification, one maysay, is never theoretically innocent. There are no appearances that we maysimply “identify,” no prerogative interpretations which exclude all others.Nevertheless, theway inwhichMacIntyremakes his case, for example in

“The Intelligibility of Action”(1986a), his most complete discussion of thetraditional concerns of social theory (which has a similarity to G. H. Meadand Charles Horton Cooley on the self [cf. MacIntyre 1986a, p. 77]), restsalmost entirely on an identification of the concept of intelligible action thatis shown to require practices, thus good reasons, and thus the concept ofthe good (MacIntyre 1986a, p. 75), and to exclude such things as intelligibleaction bymachines, which “lack the relevant kind of history and the relevantkind of social relationships” (MacIntyre 1986a, p. 79). He says, correctly,that this is not a “demonstration of a conceptual truth to the effect thatintelligible action cannot be predicated of machines” (MacIntyre 1986a,p. 79). But this claim, like the case for tradition as a whole, seems to fallinto the long series of arguments in which MacIntyre’s identifications ofwhat is to be explained do the work of excluding rivals. If these argumentsare problematic, so is the structure as a whole.

Notes

1. One of the features of his style that is illustrated by his work on the issues ofsocial science as a whole is the use of the outlying province of philosophy of the


social sciences as a base for attacking the fashionable issues of the metropole (cf.MacIntyre 1978b, p. 21).

2. Of course there are qualifications – the probative force of the identifications isnot absolute. It may be, MacIntyre suggests, that there are unnoticed, glandularconditions that would validate the claim that an action was really caused ratherthan rational (MacIntyre 1957a, pp. 35–36).

3. This line of reasoning has a fascinating history. The Catholic side of the problemhas recently been reconstructed by Leszek Kolakowski in his book on Pascal andhis context, entitled God Owes Us Nothing (Kolakowski 1995), which deals withJansenism. The phrase “God owes us nothing” cuts to the heart of the problem.There is no such thing as cashing in onGod’s promises of salvation simply becausethe notion of owing does not apply toGod as omniscient and omnipotent, and theidea that we can bind God to promises in this way is absurdly presumptuous.

4. MacIntyre’s argument is this:Weber describes this as if the psychological pressure of the need to knowif one were saved had distorted the logical consequences of Calvinism.But in fact Calvinism and Calvin himself had always had to accommodatethe commandments to good works in the Bible. Calvin was committedto the following propositions: 1. God commands good works; 2. It is ofthe highest importance possible to do what God commands; 3. Goodworks are irrelevant to what is of most importance to you, your salvationor damnation. It is a requirement of logic, not of psychological pressures,that one of these propositions bemodified; the alternative is contradiction.Moreover, unless it is the third proposition which is modified, preachingand legislation on morals, two central Calvinist activities, which are alsorationally backed up by doctrine, lose their point. (MacIntyre 1962, p. 55)

5. MacIntyre returns to the problem of causality in the social realm and history in“Causality in History” (1976). Weber’s account of the causes of the Great War,from a letter MacIntyre does not identify, which targeted Slav expansionism asthe key contributing cause, is taken as an example of a bad explanation. TheMarxist view that the war was inevitable, given certain long-standing conditions,is claimed by MacIntyre to be correct. The methodological grounds on whichthe claim is made, however, involve a revision (and application to history) ofthe account of legal causality in Hart and Honore (1959). The new revision isactually very close to Weber’s own views, with this difference: Weber regardedcausal claims of this kind as claims that the presence of a given factor, relative toa reference class of preselected factors, increases the probability of the outcome,and thus he saw all causal claims of this type as relative to the selection of thereference class. MacIntyre argues, consistent with this model, that the particularcause Weber selected did not meet this criterion since the outcome would havehappened anyway, but he seems to have failed to recognize that the claim thatthe reference class produced the inevitable (presumably meaning a very highprobability) result of war itself is a causal claim that needs to be warranted bycomparison to a preselected reference class, and thus misses Weber’s point: thatthis selection, like all such selections, is a result of the historian’s interest, andnot given in history.


6. The significance of this text, which figures in a central passage in After Virtue,is pointed up much later, in MacIntyre’s interview with Borradori, in which hediscussed the influence on his thinking of Franz Steiner, an anthropologist. Hedates this influence, interestingly, to the early fifties. MacIntyre says:[Steiner] pointedme towardways of understandingmoralities that avoidedboth the reductionism of presenting morality as a mere secondary expres-sion of something else, and the abstractionism that detaches principlesfrom socially embodied practice. Rival forms of such practice are in con-tention, a contention which is neither only a rational debate between rivalprinciples nor a class of rival social structures, but always inseparably both.(MacIntyre 1991d, p. 259)

4 Modern(ist) Moral Philosophyand MacIntyrean CritiqueJ . L . A . G A R C I A

We have to describe and explain a building, the upper story of which waserected in the nineteenth century; the ground floor dates from the sixteenthcentury, and a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that itwas reconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century. In thecellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-incave, in thefloor ofwhich stone tools are found and remnants of glacial faunain the layers below. That would be a sort of picture of ourmental structure.1

1. INTRODUCTION

My title and topic here call to mind both the title and themes ofG. E. M. Anscombe’s article, now almost half a century old, “ModernMoral Philosophy” (1958). In one of the twentieth century’s most widelyreprinted and influential pieces of philosophical writing, which gave us theterm (and the topic) consequentialism and helped spawn both the line ofinquiry later called philosophy of action and the revival of interest in themoral virtues, Anscombe defended three principal theses. First, she urgedphilosophers not to explore moral philosophy until possessed of an ade-quate philosophical moral psychology. Second, both they and the rest ofsociety should abjure conducting moral discussion using the discourse of“morally right/wrong,” of “morally ought,” ofmoral obligation, themorallyrequired/forbidden/permitted, and so on, because those terms mean noth-ing substantive today, retaining only what she memorably called “mesmericforce.” Third, the differences among modernist moral philosophers, muchdiscussed by her predecessors and contemporaries in the profession, notleast in their elaborations of C. D. Broad’s contrast between “teleological”and “deontological” theories, are in fact of little importance, maskingagreements that, though deeper and more significant than the overblowndisputes, had gone largely neglected, unacknowledged, unnoticed, andundefended.

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Modern(ist) Moral Philosophy and MacIntyrean Critique 95

Much of Alasdair MacIntyre’s work on ethics can be read as addressingthe matters that Anscombe had thrust into the foreground, whether or nother work figured in his thinking intentionally, thematically, systematically,or even consciously. From his book The Unconscious, published the sameyear as Anscombe’s article, through his more recent work on moral virtues,MacIntyre has sought to help provide us a more philosophically adequatepsychology, informed, in a way that distinguishes it from most of thatby Anscombe and her philosophical colleagues in Britain and the UnitedStates, by wide reading in social and individual psychology and in otherparts of the social and biological sciences. Similarly, his account, especiallyin After Virtue, of our moral discourse as, in effect, emotive, and his view ofour talk of moral rights, duties, and so on as “survivals” that lack coherentand accepted conditions of application, both serve to amplify, flesh out, anddefend a position close to Anscombe’s second thesis. Here too, as illustratedby his treatment of Polynesian “tabu” in After Virtue (pp. 111–113) andThree Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (pp. 182–186), MacIntyre draws onthe empirical social sciences. Finally, though today MacIntyre seldomdirectly addresses topics classed under the rubrics of moral problems orpractical/applied ethics, from Marxism and Christianity through WhoseJustice? Which Rationality? he works to undermine both utilitarian andneo-Kantian accounts of justice and practical rationality, the very accountsthat underlie the de facto consensus on normative issues that Anscombedecries in expounding her third thesis. There she points out that both theutilitarian followers of G. E. Moore and the soi disant Kantian followers ofW. D. Ross and Henry Prichard agreed that the goal of avoiding possiblyunwelcome consequences could justify even the most patently unjustand immoral actions – anything from taking for others’ use someone’svital organs to framing innocent parties, blasphemy, betrayal, and sexualperversion.MacIntyre’s critique of modernist moral philosophy, for all these simi-

larities, does not at all simply recapitulate Anscombe’s. His criticism is moredetailed, deeply informed by his ties toMarxism and his reading in the socialsciences and by elements distinctively his own. Introduced and developedover more than four decades of texts, his critical examination covers moreground than I can hope to examine here. Instead, this chapter explores justfour themes. Before getting to their specifics, I should interject some re-marks about my aims and methods. I mean to offer a reading of some ofMacIntyre’s arguments and positions, to concentrate on articulating theircontent and assessing them. I do not try to defend the accuracy of my inter-pretations ofMacIntyre’s texts, or examine the accuracy of his own readings

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of particular moral philosophical texts from the modernist epoch. What is,I think, more interesting is what his texts suggest to us, whether and howthose suggestions are helpful, and the extent to which they may be correctand even insightful. Those latter topics provide my focus, and the inter-pretive matters – both mine of MacIntyre and MacIntyre’s of modernity’sgreat thinkers – will be treated in only cursory fashion.

2. MacINTYRE’S CRITIQUE OF MODERNIST MORALPHILOSOPHY: EXPOSITION

At the end of After Virtue, MacIntyre pairs a striking disjunction with aneven more startling conjunction. Nietzsche or Aristotle? he asks provoca-tively (p. 256). As signposts to his answer, he points to Leon Trotsky andSt. Benedict. What does he mean by this question and this answer? Con-sider, first, whatMacIntyre calls “the Enlightenment Project” (p. 36), whichaims to justify, in a secular way and for a secular age, retaining a moral codemuch like traditional Christian morality, especially its emphasis on benevo-lence andmercy.The project rootedmorality in human practical rationality,which it understood largely as instrumental or as autonomously legislative,or in human nature, which it understood in a rigorously nonteleologicalmode (p. 52). (Especially in the past century, this new moral approachbecame increasingly forthright in repudiating traditional Christian sexualmorality.) MacIntyre thinks that this project can now be seen to have failedand, in counterposing Aristotle to Nietzsche (pp. 109–120, 256–259) andlinking Leon Trotsky to Benedict (pp. 261–263) I think MacIntyre meansthat in its wake we face only two choices.On one hand, we can more frankly reject morality altogether, appeal-

ing only to natural passions and drives, some idiosyncratic and capricious,some social, and some universal but wild. This is the alternative to whichNietzsche points us. On the other hand, we can undertake the arduous taskof reevaluating and ultimately modifying the modernists’ turn against tele-ology and attempt to reconceive morality along lines similar to Aristotle’s.This will be a lonely task, because so many, including many intellectu-als, have convinced themselves that, while some reforms remain to be im-plemented, our moral order and our moral thought are basically in goodorder and without need of fundamental reconstruction. MacIntyre thinksthose in his more radical project, then, will need largely to do their think-ing within groups sharing the same fundamental standards and objectives,while reading much more widely beyond these traditions of inquiry.2 This


confronts themwith two chief options on how to relate to those outside: theTrotskyanmodel of active, subversive engagementwith the largerworld andthe Benedictine model of withdrawal from it to ordered privacy. MacIntyrerealizes neither has a great chance of success in modern conditions because,despite its self-image of tolerance, liberal society will brook neither certainforms of challenge nor withdrawal.In the passage I prefixed to this discussion, Jung uses the image of

an old house, with sections dating from different centuries and founda-tions containing still older elements, to help us in thinking about the mind.We could readily apply the same image to MacIntyre’s conception of bothWestern societies in themodernist epoch and also the vocabulary and formsof thought they use to conduct their discourse.3 As with the house’s parts,the disparate provenance of the different components may not be obviousand may have been forgotten. It is also likely that over time the fissuresbecome deeper and the structure less stable, even if the joints are hid-den to all but the trained eye. Thus, like Anscombe, MacIntyre has longcomplained that, in our moral discourse, we freely shift from concepts ofnatural law to natural rights, from obligation to virtue, from self-interestto sacrificial charity, from consideration only of overall consequences tocompassion for immediate victims to interest in one’s own higher interestand long-term self-improvement, without noticing the very different his-tories and, he thinks, incompatible bases and presuppositions from whichthese concepts and vocabularies emerge. MacIntyre thinks this modernmoral ‘order’ a mess approaching a deeper crisis of its own internal contra-dictions, as in Marxist eschatology, and he thinks the project that hidesits messiness an exercise more in obfuscation than in its self-describedenlightenment.I will explore five claims I think MacIntyre makes against the forms

of moral philosophy that have predominated in the West from the timethat the medieval epoch started giving way to the modern, and especiallysince the Enlightenment cemented the triumph of postmedieval forms ofthought. I neither claim, nor presuppose, nor even think that these exhaustthe intellectual bases for MacIntyre’s dissatisfaction with the theories ofSmith, Hume, Kant, Mill, and their admiring successors. Mine is only aselection. However, I do think that the claims I attribute to MacIntyre andexamine below are among the most significant, both in the way they targettheses that lie deep within those philosophies and are characteristic of it,and in the ways they provide grounds for several of MacIntyre’s distinctiveelements in the more positive vision of moral philosophy he developedduring the past century’s last two decades.

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The first of these claims is that the modernists’ moral philosophies ig-nore the dependence of both justice and moral reasoning on (fairly specific)standards and thus on (group) traditions. I call this one single part of hiscritique, but it should be clear that it involves several distinct claims. First,MacIntyre seems to reject the project of deducing substantive moral judg-ments from the meaning of very general evaluative terms such as ‘ought’or ‘right’ or ‘good’. This was a major contention of his early book A ShortHistory of Ethics, rethinking whose claims, he recently said (see MacIntyre1991a and 1991d), was the source of his moral philosophical project sincethemid-1970s, and it animates several of the essays, especially on themean-ing and use of ‘ought,’ collected in Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essayson Ideology and Philosophy (1971). Rather, MacIntyre maintains that some-one can figure out what she ought or has to do only by determining herresponsibilities within her situation.4

This might be uncontroversial when narrowly construed. No utilitarianor Kantian thinker denies that an agent’s circumstances affect what sheought to do. For MacIntyre, however, the way in which the agent is perti-nently situated includes not just whether she has made any promises nowcoming due or stands to help or harm many people by her choice. Rather,it extends also to the relationships in which she stands to other people, theroles she occupies, and therefore – this is the second important claim – hethinks that it can include the expectations her society’s traditions properlyvest in them (and, therein, in her). This pushes MacIntyre’s thought to-ward relativism, and the charge that his position is relativist has frequentlybeen lodged (see, for example, Haldane 1994). Below, I turn more fully toMacIntyre’s relation to relativism. Here it is important to note that his re-cent position requires a complex background against which any judgmentthat someone ought to do something needs to be legitimated in order for itto be rationally acceptable. This judgmentmust be tied to pertinent virtues,and the virtues to what he calls “practices.” Further, because “no individuallives her or his life wholly within the confines of any one practice,” the prac-tices and their goods also need to be brought into such harmony as to yieldcoherent and potentially fulfilling lives for the people participating in them(see, for example, MacIntyre 1992b, esp. pp. 7–8). Finally, this fulfillmentneeds to be understood as such by some tradition of moral inquiry intohuman flourishing, which tradition is itself rationally superior to its rivals.MacIntyre contrasts the bare, untethered moral ‘ought’, which has

plagued Western thought and confounded its philosophers from Humeonward, with the ‘ought’-judgments of Homeric and medieval times (AfterVirtue, pp. 121–130, 165–180; see also MacIntyre 1971d, pp. 143–145). In


those days, anyone could normally tell what a person ought to do becausewhat she was to do was so to behave as to fulfill herself as a warrior, or acitizen, or a husband or wife, or a Greek, or a monk, or a Christian, or asoccupying some such social position. That is not to say there could not beconflicts. However, even then someone knew that, to borrow a familiar ex-ample from the mythological tradition, Agamemnon owed it to Menelausas a brother, a fellow king, a Greek, to help him to regain his wife, whilehe also owed it to Iphigenia and Clytemnestra to act protectively towardhis family and daughter, even if there was some tension between these twosocially recognized debts. Indeed, as MacIntyre sees it, these debts werenot merely recognized by society, but largely created by its structure andpractices, which themselves provide the moral vocabulary necessary to givethe responsibilities content and specificity. In this Homeric morality, thereis nothing that Agamemnon ought to do, nothing virtuous for him to be,no projects incumbent upon him except as occupying one or another ofthese roles, which his society creates, shapes, and defines, and whose telosit furnishes. This is the chief reason MacIntyre thinks much of our nor-mative discourse, especially in morality, operates emotively. As in the past,to be legitimate our ‘ought’-judgments need backing by reasons and thusby practical rationality. However, unlike some historical epochs, MacIntyrebelieves that, in this society and time, our rationality (that is, we, reasoning)cannot get sufficient purchase to supply fully defensible grounds. Our rea-soning lacks the social context needed to give moral judgments clear anddeterminate content and to provide adequate standards for their rationalassessment. This point naturally leads into his view of the deductive gapbetween factual judgments and moral judgments that Hume is thought tohave noticed and that drew great attention from MacIntyre’s colleagueswithin analytical philosophy, especially in the last century’s middle third(After Virtue, pp. 56–57).5

A second element in MacIntyre’s critical analysis of the modernists’moral philosophies is that they so divorce what they regard as ‘facts’ from‘values’ that our moral practice becomes operationally emotivist, with dif-ferent factionswithin society arguing against others inways that tend to turnboth desperate and self-righteous (see, for example, After Virtue, pp. 6–8,23–25). Desperate, because each senses that (though not why) it can-not conclusively establish its position’s correctness; self-righteous, becauseeach knows that (though, again, not why) its position cannot be conclu-sively exposed as incorrect. Facts and values, as we understand them today,MacIntyre holds to be Enlightenment inventions, designed precisely tocontrast with each other in such ways as to create between them a gap

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that cannot be bridged. Like the noncognitivists, MacIntyre insists on thisgap and on our inability to eliminate it. Unlike them, he thinks this is not ageneral logical phenomenon, but a historical peculiarity of our epoch (AfterVirtue, pp. 18–19). ForMacIntyre, there are no resources simply internal toreason as such that can justify our normative judgments. Rather, he thinksboth moral reasoning and moral concepts are inherently historical artifactsrequiring a certain social context for people to recognize and employ therelevant concepts in a clear, determinate way, and for their applications tobe rationally defensible according to accepted standards.6

A third line of criticism thatMacIntyre directs against the thinking of themajor moral philosophers of modernity is that it promotes and acquiescesin the fragmentation of the modern subject into disparate (and, it appears,sometimes conflicting) roles without providing any basis or method for herreunification, coherence, and integr(al)ity. Here,MacIntyre’s position seems tobe that we moderns recognize elements of our plight, tacitly and implicitlyif not as such, and that we allow for it in our practical thinking, again even ifnot in our theories of practical rationality.We accommodate this breakdownin our moral discourse chiefly by taking refuge in other kinds of evaluationwhere things seem not so bad. Specifically, we see our less controversialresponsibilities within the roles we occupy, and focus on them, sometimesunifying them when we need to under some general and seemingly clear,determinate, and uncontroversialmanagerial concepts, such as those of effi-ciency, profit maximization, health, and ‘pragmatism’. MacIntyre dismissessuch concepts’ claims to be either uncontroversial or useful in settling ambi-guities or conflicts (MacIntyre 1977b). Theymake sense only within certainassumptions, which themselves are controverted and need support we can-not provide them. As for the roles themselves, they are disparate, can pullin different directions, and stand in need of some larger justifying purpose.So, if I understand him, MacIntyre sees us moderns fulfilling our variousroles, when we do, with no adequate grounds for thinking we are thereinliving fulfilled and worthwhile lives.7

A fourth of MacIntyre’s grounds for rejecting modernist moral theoriesis that these philosophies permit, and even encourage, the subject to seeher private (and her faction’s) self-interest as pitted against both the good ofother individuals and, more important, the good of the larger political com-munity.MacIntyre hopes to call into question and reduce the scope of, if notwholly to overcome, the familiar opposition between the good of the indi-vidual and that of her group (see, for example, Dependent Rational Animals,pp. 108–109).These can be reconciled, even partially, onlywhen the private,


the small group’s, and the larger community’s goods are objectively andproperly understood as interdependent both in principle and in fact. Wheneach decides its good for itself, there is manifest potential for wide and deepconflict. MacIntyre’s concern here may be both theoretical and existential.Theoretically, we cannot accurately understand someone’s welfare exceptas constituted by her flourishing as a member of some definite community.Indeed, there may be no such thing as her flourishing except her flourishingas such a member. Existentially, we cannot live fulfilled lives in the contextof the radical alienation and anomie that characterize modernity. However,none of the totalitarianisms that have attempted to provide a larger sense ofmeaning, a sense of being part of something important beyond ourselves,has yet succeeded in justifying itself, even if some have temporarily avoidedsociopolitical oppression.The fifth and last of the issues that we will raise from MacIntyre’s

critique resides in his view, retained and adapted from his Marxist days,that much of the vaunted rationality and freedom on which liberal thinkershave prided their culture since the Enlightenment masks sinister inter-ests of some groups over others. Some of what are frequently presentedas features of universal reason or as uncontroversial values (e.g., efficiency)function to serve (and to conceal) these groups’ interests by delegitimizingany opposition as parochial, romantic, narrow, mystical, dogmatic, unsci-entific, or otherwise irrational, illiberal, and unjustified. Here, MacIntyresides with the genealogists and other postmodernist “masters of suspi-cion” in challenging this intellectual hegemon. Unlike them, however,MacIntyre never deprecates rationality, objectivity, justification, or or-dered liberty as such. Rather, he questions the identification of these withtheir recent modernist social manifestations and theoretical conceptualiza-tions. For him, challenge and pluralism are stages on the way to a recon-ceived reason and truth, which are never fully attained, but may better beapproximated.

3. MacINTYRE’S RESPONSE TO MODERNIST MORALPHILOSOPHY: SUMMARY

Fromhis earliest writings,MacIntyre set himself in opposition to the liberalorder of modernism. Like others before him, and in keeping with his deepbelief in the communal and the historical, he consistently maintains thata nonliberal order would have to draw heavily not only for its critique of

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liberalism, but also for its positive alternative to liberalism, on sources ofwhich some were plainly premodern and others we might today classify aspostmodern. The two chief sources were Christianity and Marxism. Thus,he later wrote of his book:

Then [in 1953, whenMarxism: an Interpretationwas first published] I aspiredto be both a Christian and a Marxist . . . now [1968, when its revision wasissued under the title Marxism and Christianity] I am skeptical of both,although also believing that one cannot entirely discard either withoutdiscarding truths not otherwise available. Then [1953] I envisioned thebeliefs of both Christians and Marxists as essentially the beliefs of organi-zations . . .Now it is clear that for both Party and [Roman Catholic] churchthe relationship of belief to organization has become much more ambigu-ous. But one still cannot evade the question of relationship. (Marxism andChristianity, pp. vii–viii)

However, he recognized, as aHegelian would, that one could not expectto reinstate eitherChristianity orMarxism as they had earlier existed.Whileboth articulated insightful criticisms of the extant order, neither, he thoughtat the time, either attempted or could withstand subjecting itself to thesame sort of critique it effectively advanced against modernism. “Christiansand Marxists both wish to exempt their own doctrines from the historicalrelativity which they are all too willing to ascribe to the doctrines of others”(Marxism and Christianity, p. ix).Eventually, he came to think that a form of Christianity could survive

such critique, and he formulated a newmoral-theoretical vision fromwithinit. In this chapter, my interest lies chiefly inMacIntyre’s criticism of thema-jor modernist philosophers’ moral thought, not in what he offers to put inits place. Nonetheless, a brief consideration of several of his positive pro-posals can help clarify just what it is to which he objects. As a physician’sdiagnosis can sometimes be better understood by looking to the treatmentprescribed, so may we better grasp pertinent elements of MacIntyre’s cri-tique if we consider alternatives MacIntyre envisions to each of the ills that,as interpreted here, he claims to have detected.In response to the first of the concerns I cited above, the fact (as he sees

it) that justice and moral reasoning depend upon fairly specific standards ofapplication and, because of that, also depend on social groups’ practices andtraditions, MacIntyre proposes that we consciously work within the mostdefensible tradition available, which he identifies as Thomas Aquinas’ syn-thesis of Aristotle’s virtues-oriented, self-perfectionist naturalist teleologywith Augustine’s conception of moral life as centered in conformity and


obedience of will to natural and divine laws (Whose Justice?, pp. 164–208;Three Rival Versions, pp. 127–148). I put the project this way to highlightthe magnitude of the work Aquinas set himself.As an alternative to the second concern above noted, that our moral

philosophies and our moral thinking so disengage ‘values’ from ‘facts’ thatwe retain no capacity for objectively grounding our normative judgments,MacIntyre proposes that we evaluate options teleologically, and thus seevalue-judgments as factual. He urges a more sociological, practice-basedteleology in After Virtue (see esp. p. 196), and a more biological teleologyinDependent Rational Animals (see esp. p. x), in such a way that we evaluatea moral subject and her actions always in relation to some telos – the kindof fact that incorporates the basis of certain value judgments.To counter the disintegration of the moral subject, briefly described

in the third of MacIntyre’s criticisms of modernist moral philosophizing,he now proposes that we subordinate any “role teleology” to more com-prehensive conceptions of human nature and flourishing, and of the goodhuman life as a coherent narrative now understood, especially inDependentRational Animals, to be rooted and revealed in the dependence and vulnerabilitywe share as humans (pp. x–xi, 1–9).In response to the fourth problem, the alienation of the individual and

her welfare from that of her group and its communal life, MacIntyre pro-poses that we conceive of the individual’s fulfillment and flourishing as aconsummation she achieves only as a member of a particular political com-munity, so that her good cannot be separated either factually or conceptu-ally from that of her political community, which community itself needs tobe shaped so as adequately to respond to humans’ natural needs as socialanimals.The fifth and last part that we identified inMacIntyre’s critique of mod-

ernist moral philosophy and the cultural patterns it attempts to rationalizeand justify was the problem of the supposed ways in which liberalism’s fa-miliar rhetoric of rationality, justice, freedom, and rights may function toconceal group interest in maintaining domination. Predictably, this kindof response has exposed MacIntyre to the charge that his criticism col-lapses into a form of relativism about morality, at least, and perhaps aboutreason itself.8

MacIntyre’s rebuttal is as radical as it is ingenious.9 It is, in effect, tooutrelativize the relativist. Rather than recoiling from relativism, as I un-derstand his strategy, MacIntyre plunges so deeply into it as, we might say,to fall out the other side. Let me explain what I mean. A crucial step is todefine the issue in such a way as to turn the tables on the relativist. Thus,

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MacIntyre holds first that the proper issue is not the attainment of moralknowledge or certainty, but only the rational superiority of a certain po-sition or, better, the rational superiority of a certain tradition. To demandmore is unrealistic. He holds second that the notion of rational superioritycan only be applied against the background of some particular set of stan-dards, which we cannot assume to be everywhere accorded the same status.Third, the comparison explicit in talk of rational superiority already impliesa second term, which further limits the objective. The most that can everbe established is that accepting a certain tradition is rationally superior toaccepting this or that other one, and all the ones comparatively evaluatedso far. Thus, MacIntyre never entirely abandons his historicism. Fourth,the verb ‘accept’ requires us to specify a mental subject, and (fifth, sixth,and seventh) the Hegelian in MacIntyre is loath to allow her to float freeof all temporal, personal, and social context. So, the question must alwaysbe whether this subject, in the particular situation she occupies within hersociety and her time, is rationally justified by her standards in making thischoice among these options.10

On this basis, as I reconstruct it, MacIntyre’s rejection of relativismabout morality and reason (really about moral reasoning) amounts so far tothe following. Contrary to what he sees as the relativist’s hasty and facileassumption, MacIntyre insists that it is not necessarily (nor always) thecase that everyone is so situated that there is no position whose adoptionby her at any time would be rationally superior to some particular set ofalternatives. Adapting (inMacIntyre 1977a) the Kuhnian notion of “episte-mological crises,” MacIntyre suggests that it is possible for (at least) someof us, by wide study and deep reflection, to come to be in such a position,relative to our own and to some other moral tradition(s), that it may berationally superior/preferable, even by our own criteria of rationality (C1),for us (people in group G1) to accept some tradition (T1) over anothertradition (T2) in our social situation (S1) and temporal location (L1). Asthe indexical terms indicate, that is a highly relativized claim. MacIntyre,as I understand him, uses it to place the strong relativist in the extremeposition of having, implausibly, to deny this possibility in principle. Nowthe tables are turned, and it is the relativist who appears the dogmatist,claiming to know in advance and a priori that no one can be so situated.Note thatMacIntyre forecloses what might seem themost appealing way ofdefending a strong relativism. For that defense would insist that standardsof rationality are themselves relative to different traditions or conceptionsof rational inquiry, andMacIntyre concedes (indeed, insists on) that claim atthe outset.


Of course, to rest with this would constitute phony victory over a strawman. Not every form of relativism need be so strong. This victory wouldallow the purportedly vanquished relativist still to say that no one in theactual world, or no one in our Western traditions of moral inquiry, or noone for the past several hundred years, has been in a situation rationally todiscern or choose as superior any from a limited number of seriously con-tending traditions. The relativist might well find that a defeat to savor. Soit is important for MacIntyre’s strategy to insist that science (as illuminatedby its philosophically understood history) gives us historical examples ofepistemological crises and how people have responded to them rationally.That provides him a model for his view that modernity has also plungedthis society into a kind of prolonged, epistemological crisis in the moralrealm. MacIntyre is not eager to claim that we are all in a position easilyto resolve (or even to recognize) our crisis. In fact, it nicely jibes with hisdismissive stance toward much recent philosophy to say that many of us,his academic colleagues – narrowly read, ignorant of the natural and so-cial sciences, unschooled in history, whose cramped specialization leaves usunfamiliar with the details and even the languages of many of the West’smoral traditions let alone those of distant lands – have no hope of findinga resolution unless we change our ways radically. Relativism is wrong inthat it is false – indeed, as MacIntyre has reversed the expected order, it isnarrow minded – to assume that there is no hope, in principle, for us toget to a point from which a rational choice among traditions can be made.However, nothing in that means it will be easy, or that most of us are alreadyin a position to make one.Moreover, MacIntyre distances himself from relativism by rejecting

what he seems to see as the most appealing form of relativism for ustoday – that is, Nietzschean genealogy – because of what he regards asits inconsistent and inadequate account of the self (Three Rival Versions,pp. 205–215). There are several aspects to this critique, most of which Iwill not explore here.11 One chief point, however, is that genealogists gotoo far, treating not just the human being qua individual (as conceived inthe Enlightenment), qua rights-bearer, and so on, as social inventions or“constructs,” but regarding humans as social constructions “all the waydown,” to adapt Richard Rorty’s phrase. Against this, the MacIntyreanwants to remind us that the process of construction must have both anagent and an input. These, of course, are already human beings, and theymust have constitutive and other qualities antecedent to the constructiveprocess. This raises the possibility that these qualities and the nature thatgrounds them can already serve as the basis of moral virtues. Likewise,

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the fact that even genealogical deconstructive analysis needs some normsof rational inquiry raises the possibility of more constructive applicationsof these norms. The genealogist’s very notions of manipulation, distrac-tion and fetishization, masking and unmasking, all likewise suggest somemore humane forms of interaction and more honest and truthful forms ofsocial organization. Finally, for genealogy and deconstruction to lead to im-proved understanding and appropriate action, for unmasking to have eithera theoretical or a practical point, there need to be norms of reasoning andmoral conduct that, even if themselves critically examined, are not therebyundermined.12

4. MacINTYRE VERSUS MODERNIST MORAL PHILOSOPHY:CRITIQUE AND ASSESSMENT

Thus far, I have essayed some sketch of several of MacIntyre’s principalmisgivings about many of theWest’s chief moral philosophical presupposi-tions, arguments, and positions from early modernism through the present.Whilemy task in this essay is chiefly expository, it may prove useful for us toundertake a few steps towards assessment. It is often the case, and especiallyin philosophical writing, that it is in subjecting it to criticism that we comenot only to appreciate a position’s strengths and weaknesses, but better tounderstand its content.On thefirst issue,MacIntyre is surely correct that evaluationof anoption

as just or rationally superior requires fairly specific standards. However, itis not obvious why or that (a set of) standards need (1) have come intoexistence publicly, (2) have developed over time, or, more important, (3) bean accepted and continuing project of some social group. That I need to usestandards to make a value or normative judgment hardly shows that I needto use socially established, lasting, and accepted ones. Nor has MacIntyreshown that no fairly specific standards are internal to the only (or to themost) defensible understanding or specification of reason or justice. Hehas marshaled arguments against Kantian, Humean, utilitarian, and otherconceptions of rationality, some more powerful than others, but the issueis hardly settled. MacIntyre may be impatient and unrealistic in insistingthat if philosophy has not yet resolved the matter, then we ought considerit beyond resolution and move on. Indeed, this presupposes his view thatto establish a thesis must be to establish it by socially recognized standards.That, however, is just what may be in dispute. Nevertheless, we shouldrecognize that MacIntyre has an important point in reminding us that it is


difficult to defend the rationality of trusting any such conception until ithas been tested by many and over time.As to the second matter, MacIntyre rightly observes both that we in-

vented the terms we use in moral reasoning and also that the related concepts,such as (and especially) those of fact and value, came to be recognized intime. However, it does not follow, and seems strange to maintain, that weinvented either facts or values, let alone that an intellectual tradition is thekey to overcoming their bifurcation.13 Again, though, it seems to me thatMacIntyre is basically correct that we need something like (along the linesof ) an Aristotelian teleology, in which a valid value judgment is a species offactual judgment, in order to yield defensible, productive, objective, ratio-nal, convincing, and noncontroversial evaluation.On the third issue, that of the fragmentation of the modern self, we

can certainly allow that MacIntyre’s conception of the individual’s good asthat which she has qua member of a political community with a traditionof rational inquiry is, doubtless, one way of overcoming ultimate fragmen-tation. However, there are alternatives we would need carefully to considerbefore we could be fully justified in rejecting them. Germain Grisez, forexample, has recently suggested that an overarching project internal tothe good of religion can lend unity to human life, and it may also be thateven within pluralistic, role-centered moral theory, a certain comprehen-sive role-relationship – such as that of God’s creature – which encompassesthe other roles that constitute moral life, could overcome such fragmenta-tion (see Grisez 2001; also Garcia 1997). Still, it may be that MacIntyre canallow for these possibilities if he allows that the fact that someone’s livingmorally may promote her individual self-interest is neither her motive norher behavior’s moral justification (Meilaender 1999).The fourth matter concerned modernism’s balkanized, atomistic psy-

chology. This certainly appears to be something socially harmful andotherwise undesirable. However, it is doubtful that we can eliminate allconflict between your individual welfare and mine or (what is different)between yours and (y)our group’s. It is, moreover, dangerous to look topolitics and to political community and tradition for this total absorp-tion of the individual into something larger.14 For all that, we shouldadmit that MacIntyre is correct to think that someone can be good (i.e.,act well) and (what is different) can flourish (i.e., fare well) only as thisor that, even if he is too restrictive in his view of what can serve theseroles.15

Finally, the kind of response to the charge of relativism that MacIntyremakes concedes that bothmorality and its rational evaluation (both internal

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and external) are relativistic, limiting only the latitudinarian implicationsof this claim. I suspect MacIntyre concedes too much to the relativist here,relativizing standards of bothmorality and rationality to social forms.Moreimportant, his concessions seem not to be required by the strength of therelativist’s arguments, but rather driven by his own prior intellectual sym-pathy forHegelian relativization of rational andmoral norms to historicallyembodied forms of social life. That said, the sort of critique I attribute toMacIntyre is unusually helpful in exposing forms of dogmatism internal tothe supposedly tolerant (and, nowadays, pragmatic) doctrines of culturalrelativism in morality.Summing up, then,MacIntyre’s claims for tradition’s necessity may well

be overstated.16 Still, he is surely correct that we need to be more awareof disputable and hidden assumptions and to avoid smug modernism, eventhose of us who continue to think we canmake genuine progress by the nowhoary techniques of conceptual analysis. Charles Taylor suggests we need toknow those intuitions’ sociohistorical origins (Taylor 1989, pp. 3–4). I sus-pect this is particularly true in questioning temporally and class-limited (orclass-concentrated) views about what either is valuable or is entitled to pro-tection from interference, social discouragement, or regulation. There is nopretending anymore that even utilitarianism can somehowmanage withoutappeal to our moral intuitions. Certainly, we must be more aware of howthose intuitions can be shaped by history, class, and circumstance. This isan important hedge against the low-minded “deontologism” of those whostrive merely to articulate and defend received elite opinion and currentprejudices – about mercy killing, sexual perversions, medicalized mutila-tions, monstrous experiments in cloning, and so on down the new agenda –of their own comfortable and educated class.I suspect MacIntyre is also correct that we should look to humans’ per-

sonhood, needs, interpersonal relationships (Homeric ‘ought’s), and virtuesrather than to duties and principles as keys to moral life – what we funda-mentally want and need in and from others and ourselves as and becausewe are humans. Robert Adams has recently pressed the old complaint thatthe traditional conception of natural law draws toomuch from this minimaltruth (Adams 1999, p. 365). Perhaps we can continue, as MacIntyre does,to call these deep features of ourselves “natural,” but acknowledge that thisis a rather modest use of the term, less grandly teleological and functioningmore like one of J. L. Austin’s “trouser words,” chiefly to exclude the possi-bility that these preferences are rootedmerely in social convention, idiosyn-cratic subjective preference, and so on (see also Adams 1999, pp. 307–308,365–366).


5. CONCLUSION

Anyone who has had occasion to teach Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, espe-cially if she has taught it to undergraduates, will have had occasion to note,regret, and make public apology for the book’s confusing and vexing for-mat. Its so-called “questions” are but the names of topics, its “articles” arein the form of questions, and each major discussion begins with a battery ofarguments – usually bolstered by erudite quotations from (and sometimescontroversial interpretations of ) an array of authorities from Scripture,scriptural commentators, church fathers, more recent theologians, as wellas from pagan philosophers – arguments severally and collectively mak-ing a case against some thesis the author holds. Only after this prologueto each “article” does Aquinas articulate and defend his own position onthe issue, proceeding then to laborious rebuttals of each “objection.” Weare not surprised such a work was never finished; the wonder is that it wasever begun.It is the maddening thoroughness of this give-and-take, so irritating

to today’s short-attention-span readers, that seems to draw MacIntyre toAquinas and his great Summa, not only as a principal source of truth andwisdom but also as a model of what he sees as the communal intellectualwork of philosophical and theological inquiry. Some aestheticians have ex-ploited the ambiguity in the term ‘painting’, which can refer both to anactivity and its finished product. We might note just the same ambiguityin the word ‘work’. Part of what seems to appeal to MacIntyre in Aquinas’great work is the way its author lets us see him working, a mind at workin wrestling with other minds in a common striving for the truth. Despitethe oft-heard and glib dismissals of Aquinas and his Christian colleaguesfor dogmatism, the Summa Theologiae is anything but a calm, imperious,context-free, and ahistorical recitation of the truth. The truth for which itstrives, and into which it sometimes offers glimpses, may be outside timeand space. However, the book itself is unmistakably and unapologetically awork of its time. It is a summation, as its name makes explicit, of what hasso far been said on the issues it treats and an interpretation of the progressthat has been made, sometimes by revealing the dead ends to which somelines of inquiry have proceeded. This is MacIntyre’s Aquinas, the paradigmof the intellectual inquirer, guided along the pathway by the lamps of tra-dition, but continually looking into what flickers in the darkness to helpus see why the lamps marking the path’s edge stand where they do. Evenif truth is eternal, we inquirers are placed in time and place, and can onlyattain those truths by reflecting with, and often by arguing against, others

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who have gone before us. This is not always pretty, but it is necessary ifwe are to learn from our history and from others’ wrong turns as well astheir progress. It is as if MacIntyre sees in Aquinas’ work an intellectualembodiment of a recent poet’s injunction:

whatever you have to say, leavethe roots on, let themdangle

And the dirt

Just to make clearwhere they come from (Olson 1987b)

Jung compared themind to a house, and I suggested above that we couldprofitably employ this metaphor in grasping MacIntyre’s view of parts ofour modern social order and its moral vocabulary. In this conclusion I haveshifted to a metaphor of inquiry as night hiking along a lantern-lit path,and the poem I cited regards our speech as if an uprooted plant. Perhapswe should see these three images in play – house, uprooted plant, night-litpath – as corresponding to three moments in MacIntyre’s analysis. In ex-amining what MacIntyre regards as our current moral babble, the poet’smetaphor of the uprooted plant helps us understand our discourse as com-posed of pieces torn from the intellectual and social context they need forintelligibility as plants need soil for sustenance. In examining the largerintellectual edifice of our moral thinking, the metaphor of the house helpsus discern that what now seems to fit may have been merely plastered to-gether or covered with a common carpeting, concealing deeper differencesin materials and underlying foundations, differences which may mean dif-ferential capacity to bear loads, etc. In considering how we ought respondto these facts, or what is to be done, the metaphor of the lamp-lit path atnight, where skeletons in the dark mark paths that did not work, helps usremember that we may be able to make progress only along paths lit byothers’ successes and marked by others’ failures. What is important to takefrom MacIntyre’s critique is the emphasis on process and our situatedness.Now, as a Christian in search of what he has reconceived as timeless truthabout our nature and origin, as earlier when, as a Marxist, he repudiatedthe class-based and imperial assumptions he discerned within EuropeanEnlightenment thought, MacIntyre has wanted to puncture the pretensionof our time’s little preoccupations and rules, which present themselves aseternal truths and inherent structures of reason itself. Whatever the truthabout truth itself, we approach truth through a dialectic process, and it is


at our own peril that we delude ourselves into believing that we can do itentirely on our own and cut off from time and space, as Descartes imaginedin his warm little chamber. We can see how to proceed, MacIntyre thinks,only by continually reviewing the places fromwhere we have come. Not forour minds is the Crystal Palace, which so excited the pulse of the Victoriansin the last glory of Enlightenment innocence thatMacIntyre explores at thebeginning of Three Rival Versions. If these minds of ours are to witness suchperfect limpidity, it must be in some future realm MacIntyre now thinksbetter envisioned by John the Divine than by Karl Marx. For our minds,even in their highest intellectual achievements, there is no leaving behindthe roots and the dirt because we need “to make clear where they comefrom.”17

Notes

1. Jung 1928, pp. 118–119; quoted in Alston Conly, “House: Charged Space,” cat-alogue of an exhibition at the McMullen Museum, Boston College, June 11–September 16, 2001.

2. MacIntyre realizes the problematic inherent in his contrast of liberal modernismwith tradition. As liberals seem to have their own great texts, powerful images,accepted avenues of thought, et cetera, why is not liberalism itself a tradition?Hisanswer is not readily discernable, but seems to boil down to the claim that whileliberalism may have some of the trappings of “tradition” and may even be calleda tradition, it is not a tradition of inquiry in the relevant sense. Especially becauseof the stark opposition it presupposes between rationality and authority, even theauthority of tradition, liberalism cannot comfortably accept itself as a tradition,and more important it cannot adequately operate as a tradition of inquiry thatmakes progress.

3. The house image is an old one. Descartes puts it to very different use fromMacIntyre in Part 2 of his Discourse on Method, in which he stresses the need forknowledge, like a house, to have good foundations, and complains about housesand towns (and, by implication, mental structures) built in different parts bydifferent architects and in different styles. For MacIntyre, the issue is not justthat of the firmness of foundations, but of the history and concealment of ill-fitting elements, seams, and joints, and of different foundations and even theirpossible absence beneath some sections later added.

4. That philosophical attention to these most general terms may be misplaced wasa point Anscombe made and on which she has been joined by BernardWilliams,among others.

5. MacIntyre himself proposed a more limited reading of Hume (1959a), but laterrevised this in Whose Justice?, pp. 311–322. It is not clear to me the extent towhich in the latter revisionMacIntyre joins the standard interpretation of Humeas denying any inference from what he deemed factual judgments to moral ones.

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6. In so talking of facts and values, and even sometimes of the “individual,” associal inventions (“constructions,” some would say today), MacIntyre makesa move characteristic of the postmodernist heroes of today’s cultural studies.Thus,Michel Foucault pointedly and influentially insisted inTheOrder of Things(1974 [1966]) that “man” himself was an invention of recent vintage, adding thathe was also one that would not last long. Here, the poststructuralist Foucaultoutdid his structuralist predecessor Claude Levi-Strauss, who had a decadeearlier reminded his readers that there were no human beings at the world’soutset and there would be none at its close. See also Lilla 1998.

7. This difficulty also afflicts the system of Homeric ‘ought’-judgments andmakesit impossible for us to return to anything like it as adequate for our purposes.

8. See, especially, Nussbaum 1989. This assumed opposition persists. In a re-cent exchange, scholars dispute whether Edmund Burke, in his rejection of theFrench Revolution, was siding with tradition against reason (see McElroy et al.2002).While the disputants allow that things are not quite so simple because in-strumental reason might indicate some value or short-term efficiency in relyingon tradition, they do not address the stronger possibilitiesMacIntyre envisages –that a tradition can itself be a tradition of rationality nor, more strongly, thatpractical rationality may require a tradition in order to flesh out its conceptionof the good life and to turn vague desiderata such as adequate considerationinto determinate criteria for use. Consider also Nozick on the parallel difficultyin theoretical assessment:Are there procedures for choosing among alternative and competing sci-entific theories of the same phenomena; do the norms or methodologyof science determine such choices among theories, so that all who followthese norms must agree in which theory they select? There are differ-ent virtues in a scientific theory, different dimensions along which it canbe evaluated: explanatory power, goodness of fit with the data, breadthand diversity of evidential support, degree of testability, range and diver-sity of phenomena it covers, simplicity, fit with accepted theories, and soon. . . . Judgments of how a theory falls along each of these dimensionsare largely intuitive. Moreover, there is certainly no adequate systematicproposal about how these different desiderata of a theory are to be com-bined in an overall evaluation, about how two competing theories are to becomparatively evaluated or ranked when one is better along one of thesedimensions, while the other is better along others. (Nozick 1981, p. 483)MacIntyre would demur chiefly regarding Nozick’s appeal to private (and

unconfirmable) intuition, where MacIntyre would invoke a time-tested tradi-tion of inquiry to set standards and make comparisons, and regarding Nozick’sapparent assumption that a theory’s epistemic adequacy can be determined out-side of such tradition-relative standards.

9. My discussion is chiefly an interpretation ofWhose Justice? See also MacIntyre1999b.

10. We might stress that, though she faces this decision by herself in an importantsense, she will have gotten there only through joint inquiry conducted by con-tinual consultation of other efforts in both her own tradition and others. For


more on inquiry’s social dimension and as modeled as a kind of Aristotelianfriendship founded on a common good, see Burrell 2000.

11. See Gutting 1999, pp. 107–110.12. “[B]oth Christianity and Marxism are constantly being refuted; and the point

here is . . . that those who lack any positive coherent view of the world them-selves still have to invoke Christianity and Marxism, even in the acts of criti-cism and refutation, as points of ideological and social reference” (Marxism andChristianity, p. viii).

13. Judith Thomson has recently suggested that teleology may not be necessary forfactual evaluation, though being good in ways (or qua this or that) is needed (seeThomson 2001, ch. 1). We ought also point out that the fact/value gap doesnot suffice for emotivism, as MacIntyre appears to presuppose in After Virtue,because prescriptivism and versions of intersubjective ethics taking moral termsto express group endorsement are also available and alternative possibilities.

14. The problem also besets some of MacIntyre’s more effective critics. It seems tome exacerbated within Gutting’s (1999) “pragmatic liberalism.”

15. Certainly, this is a more sensible approach than some recent efforts to under-stand human benefit. Judith Thomson, for example, offers a bifurcated analysisof what is good for someone, referring most forms of benefit, especially thosewe share with lower animals, to our functioning as humans, but deferring othersto subjective desires, insisting only that the latter be filtered in various ways toensure that they are serious, informed, voluntary (see Thomson 2001, ch. 1).What is startling here is that Thomson never raises the obvious question of howsomeone’s wanting this or that itself fits with desire’s function in human life.

16. Moreover, the historicismMacIntyre thinks internal to traditionmay clash withthe locality he also emphasizes. For more on this, see Gutting 1999, pp. 99–101.

17. I express thanks toPatrickByrne, SarahHarper,MarkMurphy, and JasonTaylorfor helpful comments on an earlier draft.

5 MacIntyre and ContemporaryMoral PhilosophyD A V I D S O L O M O N

The task of this chapter is to give a general account of Alasdair MacIntyre’sviews in moral philosophy. This would be a difficult task to carry outin the short space allowed for any major moral philosopher, but thereare well-known reasons why it is even more formidable for MacIntyre.MacIntyre has been publishing important work in moral philosophy forover half a century, and in the early years of the new millennium he showsno signs of slowing down. His views in ethics have changed in importantrespects during this period and they continue to develop, sometimesin surprising ways. These difficulties in interpreting MacIntyre arecompounded by the fact that he does not neatly separate his work in ethicsfrom his work in action theory, philosophy of language, and philosophyof the social sciences. And, notoriously, his systematic views in ethics aredeveloped against the background of a rich and controversial account of thehistory of ethics. Moreover, his work in ethics has engaged in a number ofdifferent ways most of the large-scale cultural developments in the last halfcentury, including especially the cold war conflicts between Marxism andliberalism, the cultural turmoil of the sixties, and radical changes withinthe Roman Catholic Church (of which he has been a member since the1980s).These characteristics of MacIntyre’s views, however, should not be ex-

aggerated. Although his views have developed in important ways, there are anumber of themes that have not changed. Indeed, it will be part of the thesisof this chapter that the continuities inMacIntyre’s ethical thought are moreimportant than the changes in it. MacIntyre himself has frequently men-tioned that his objections to liberalism have remained constant through-out the development of his thought, although they have been made fromslightly different perspectives at different times. He has also consistentlyrejected emotivist and relativist approaches to ethics, while at the sametime rejecting the main foundationalist alternatives to these approaches.Throughout his career he has shown an openness to a robust naturalism inethics, while always (unlike some others who have championed the cause

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MacIntyre and Contemporary Moral Philosophy 115

of virtue) emphasizing the centrality and ineliminability of moral rules inthe moral life.It also seems to me that MacIntyre’s reputation as an outsider to main-

stream academic moral philosophy is misleading. Although he often writesin a manner that contributes to the myth that he is an outsider hoping topull down the house of academic moral philosophy, careful attention tohis work throughout his career belies this reputation. MacIntyre has in-deed been almost a model philosophical citizen. He has carefully and fairlyreviewed the books of his most important philosophical opponents and re-sponded patiently to their criticisms of his own work. No contemporarymoral philosopher has made a greater effort to open himself to dialoguewith his opponents, nor has any moral philosopher been more gracious inacknowledging his debts to others.In suggesting that MacIntyre is a good philosophical citizen, and not

the enfant terrible he is sometimes held to be, I do not intend to deny thathe is distinctive in a number of respects among contemporary Anglophonemoral philosophers. As already noted, he pays much more attention to thehistory of ethics than domost other contemporary moral philosophers, andhe does not simply combine his superb historical learning with a distinctcapacity for systematic ethical theory. It is impossible to separate his the-ses in systematic moral philosophy from his historical claims. In criticizingthe Enlightenment Project, he is also criticizing the Enlightenment. Hisdefense of Aquinas is inseparable from his careful historical scholarship onAquinas. Some of MacIntyre’s most astute critics recognize that to criticizehis ethics it will be necessary to criticize his history.1 MacIntyre also, ofcourse, pays much more attention to the social sciences than do most othercontemporary moral philosophers. He not only says that “every moral phi-losophy presupposes a sociology,” he also claims to investigate the sociologypresupposed by themoral philosophies he discusses. Like many continentalphilosophers, he engages the thought of Marx and Freud and brings theirwork into contact with the projects of moral philosophy. He has been alsoinfluenced, in ways that are unusual for most Anglophone moral philoso-phers, by the thought of such continental figures as Gadamer, Maritain,and, more recently, Edith Stein and Husserl.In spite of the many ways in whichMacIntyre’s work differs from that of

most off-the-shelf Anglophone moral philosophers, his work in ethics canbe understood in relation to the standard divisionswithin twentieth-centuryanalyticmoral philosophy’smetaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics.In the first half of the twentieth century, academic moral philosophy cameto be dominated by a set of questions about the meaning of key ethical

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terms and the logical structure of moral arguments. This set of questions,and a variety of semantic and logical techniques for answering them, definedwhat came to be called metaethics. This problematic lives on in contem-porary ethics, although in a slightly chastened and less central form. In the1960s, and especially in the early 1970s, there was a revival of the kind oflarge-scale normative theorizing characteristic of such historical figures asKant, Bentham, Hobbes, and Aristotle. Disputes within normative ethicscame to dominate most academic discussions in ethics in the last quar-ter century, and the classical arguments between Kant and Bentham – orHobbes and Aquinas – are being refought by their twentieth-century surro-gates. At about the time that philosophers started turning their attention tothe project of normative ethics, they also began commenting on particularmoral quandaries arising in particular social and professional contexts –medicine, the environment, the relation between men and women, theobligations of citizenship, and so forth. Applied ethics then became a thirdcontext, characterized by a set of questions and increasingly by a set of com-peting theoretical approaches, for discussion among contemporary moralphilosophers.MacIntyre’s relation to contemporary discussions in metaethics, nor-

mative ethics, and applied ethics is complex. On the one hand, he has madeimportant contributions to all three areas. He has defended a robust cog-nitivism in metaethics, a rich Aristotelianism in normative ethics, and anumber of particular views within applied ethics. At the same time, hehas been critical of the framework that has shaped much of the discussionin these three areas. It is the somewhat Janus-faced aspect of MacIntyre’scontributions to these three areas, I want to argue, that makes his role incontemporary philosophy open to such differing interpretations.MacIntyrethe outsider is critical of the pretensions of metaethics and normative ethicsand of their ideological and self-deceived roles, as he sees them, in manycontemporary discussions. MacIntyre the good philosophical citizen nev-ertheless models the right way to do metaethics and normative ethics. Dis-cussions in each of these areas of ethics arise out of genuine questions, andthese questions demand answers that it is the duty of philosophers to pur-sue. MacIntyre has pursued these answers as vigorously and with as muchintegrity as any contemporary philosopher. At the same time, he is fullyalive to the possibility that the framework within which these questionsarise may itself be distorted by ideological pressure, by bureaucratic formsof organization, or by other forces that the philosopher’s cultural and histor-ical naıvete ill suit him or her to recognize. MacIntyre sometimes can givethe impression of being engaged in a perverse Neurathian project – trying


to rebuild the ship of ethics while simultaneously loudly claiming that itcannot actually be rebuilt – and further charging that, even if it could, itwould certainly sink at its mooring.In what follows, I will structure the discussion by examiningMacIntyre’s

contributions to two of the three areas of ethics I have distinguished here –metaethics and normative ethics. For reasons of space, I will largely ignorehis contributions to applied ethics. While examining his particular contri-butions, however, we will be also examining the ways in which he is criticalof the framework of discussion in each area and his suggestions about howthe questions and techniques in each area should be transformed.2 In thefinal section we will turn briefly to a discussion of two significant criticismsof MacIntyre’s work in ethics.

1. METAETHICS

There is a perennial distinction inmoral philosophy between abstract ques-tions of conceptual structure and meaning in ethics, and concrete questionsabout the content of moral principles or rules – or the appropriate lists ofvirtues and goods. It was left to the twentieth-century metaethical tradi-tion, however, to sharpen this distinction into an orthodoxy so rigid thatit almost strangled creative ethical thought. It was presupposed by almosteveryone in this tradition that there was something distinctive about morallanguage and moral argument, and that it was the primary (or possiblyexclusive) task of moral philosophy to explore these special semantic andlogical features of the moral. Metaethical investigations in this traditionwere sharply distinguished from normative ethics (which took up substan-tive ethical questions), and it was frequently suggested that moral philoso-phers, as philosophers, should confine their activity strictly to metaethicalinvestigations.3

The story of the history of classical metaethics from G. E. Moore toits transformation in the final third of the twentieth century has been fre-quently told, not least by MacIntyre himself in the penultimate chapterof his Short History of Ethics. It is common now to distinguish three mainphases in this history:

1. The intuitionism of Moore, Prichard, and Ross, which focused on theautonomy of the ethical and the evaluative and, in Moore’s case, on theindefinability of the most basic ethical terms.

2. The noncognitivist reaction to intuitionism made popular by the workof Stevenson and Ayer, and developed in a later, more sophisticated

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form by R. M. Hare.4 The noncognitivists shared the intuitionists’objections to “naturalistic” definitions of evaluative terms, but rejectedthe intuitionists’ view that themain task of ethical discourse is to ascribeproperties to actions or persons. The noncognitivist emphasis on theaction-guiding role of the ethical led them to attribute a special formof meaning (variously, emotive meaning, evaluative meaning, or pre-scriptive meaning) to ethical terms and to argue that moral argumentshould be understood as embodying an irreducible rhetorical compo-nent which could not be captured in any purely cognitive metaethicalview.

3. The “naturalistic” rejection of the excesses of both intuitionism andnoncognitivism by such thinkers as Foot, Geach, Toulmin, Searle, andMacIntyre himself in the 1950s and 1960s.

MacIntyre’s first important work in ethics, his master’s thesis5 (1951),was written very much in the spirit of classical metaethics and attempted tomove beyondwhat was already being called an impasse between cognitivistsand noncognitivists in this metaethical discussion. In this thesis, The Signif-icance of Moral Judgments, he develops a number of themes that figure in hisdiscussion of metaethics in the decades to follow. Almost half of the thesis istaken up with close criticism of Moore’s intuitionism and Stevenson’s emo-tivism. While he rejects both intuitionist and emotivist metaethical viewsusing familiar arguments, he also argues that the intuitionists and emo-tivists shared a number of views about the metaethical project itself that heregards as mistaken. Indeed, he argues that all participants in the metaeth-ical discussion shared a tendency to oversimplify the metaethical projectby supposing that it is possible to discover a relatively simple characteriza-tion of the meaning of moral discourse. MacIntyre argues, however, evenat this early stage in his thought, that the meaning of such discourse willnot conform to a single pattern. As he says in summing up this point:

The most important step in the understanding of the significance of moraljudgments is taken at the point whenwe cease to look for a referentialmean-ing for them, naturalistic or non-naturalistic. The temptation is, of course,to go on from this to deny them anything but an emotive or psychologicalsignificance as interjections. But once we have seen that significance doesnot derive from reference, that every kind of sentence has its own kind oflogic, and that these logics are the logics of languages in use, we can formu-late the sense in which moral judgements have significance by exhibitingthe logic of their usage. (Significance of Moral Judgments, p. 73)


There are places in the thesis where MacIntyre seems to lean toward abroadly naturalistic view of moral language, as when he says:

Frequently when all the facts have been related, nothing more remains tobe said. At the end of “Madame Bovary” we do not want Flaubert to say,we do not want to say ourselves, “Emma Bovary was a bad woman.”We aremore likely to do as the French have done and cease to use the word “bad”to describe that kind of woman in the future, using instead a word coinedfrom her name. (Significance of Moral Judgments, p. 65)

There is no non-natural property to be added to the facts in this case,nor need there be an emotive overlay. MacIntyre makes it clear, however,that even the naturalistic accounts of moral language that most tempt himoversimplify the “logic of moral discourse.”In the final chapter of the thesis, MacIntyre turns his attention

from his criticism of the standard metaethical positions to constructivesuggestions about how an exploration of the “logic of moral languagein use” might work. He carefully dissects a number of moral argumentsdrawn from literary texts by, among others, E. M. Forster, VirginiaWoolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Aeschylus. By looking carefully at thesearguments, MacIntyre attempts to establish the diversity of forms of moralargument and the dangers of any attempt (as he later puts it in “Ought”)to “homogenize” our moral vocabulary or forms of moral argument. Inthe end his claim is that intuitionism, emotivism, and naturalism each pickout some feature of moral judgment and moral argument and elevate it toa kind of paradigmatic status. The central mistake made by the classicalmetaethicists is one of oversimplification, a mistake that can only be madegood by attending to the variety and complexity of moral language andmoral discussion. He ends the thesis with this characteristic MacIntyreanflourish:

It is because they enable us to solve problems of appraisal and of actionthat moral judgements possess significance. They are part of a patternof language and action, continually to be adjusted and criticized, and justbecause they are never exempt from criticism to be accorded the title ofreasonable or unreasonable, as the case may be. Above all they arise outof the way in which we see the world and the way in which our languageallows us to see the world. We cannot sufficiently emphasize the directiongiven to our appraisals by the language which happens to be available forour descriptions. It is as we see the facts that we judge the world. Buteven within the limits of our language, vague and imprecise as it so oftenis, there is better and worse reasoning, there are correct and mistaken

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decisions. But on this topic one can only be conscious of how little hasbeen said, how much remains to say. (Significance of Moral Judgments,p. 92)

MacIntyre attempts to say over the next half century much of what heregards at mid-century as remaining to be said. His later work continuesto emphasize themes clearly enunciated in this early work: (1) that moraljudgments are important because of their connection with “problems ofappraisal andof action”; (2) thatmoral judgments are never beyond criticismand dispute and that just for this reason the categories of the reasonableand the unreasonable apply to them and the arguments for them; (3) thatmoral judgments grow out of how we see the world, and that vision is morecentral to moral judgment than attitude; and (4) that the contours of ourmoral thought and action are constrained by “the language which happensto be available for our descriptions.”MacIntyre pursues both his critical and constructivemetaethical sugges-

tions at many places in his later works, particularly in the last chapter of theShort History, a number of the essays reprinted in the second half of Againstthe Self-Images of the Age, and, of course, in the opening chapters of AfterVirtue. In all of these discussions he shows respect for the integrity of thework done by the classical metaethicists while sharply criticizing many oftheir conclusions and, more importantly, their self-understanding. His par-ticular criticisms of the intuitionists and the noncognitivists in this traditiondiffer little frommany of those raised by other critics at the time (Strawson’scriticism of intuitionism andGeach and Foot’s criticisms of noncognitivismwere particularly influential). His reaction to classical metaethics is dis-tinctive, however, in at least two ways. First, unlike most other critics, heis concerned to explore in some depth why the views of intuitionists likeMoore and emotivists like Stevensonwere so persuasive; second, he is inter-ested not only in assessing particular metaethical views but also in assessingthe enterprise of metaethics itself. His most important conclusions aboutthe metaethical enterprise are threefold: (1) the main metaethical viewsare mistaken as metaethical views; (2) nevertheless, these views illuminateimportant features of the cultures in which they were put forward; and(3) the enterprise of metaethics as conceived by most of those engaging init embodies mistaken views about how moral concepts are related to theircultural setting.MacIntyre’s discussion of metaethics in A Short History once again

provides brief criticisms of all of the main positions in the metaethicaltradition.6 His overall diagnosis of metaethical disagreement in this work,


however, is more narrowly specified than it was in his thesis written a decadeand a half earlier. In Short History he argues that the central metaethical dis-agreement between cognitivist and noncognitivist metaethical views is bestunderstood as growing out of a conflict between persons speaking fromoutside any moral view and those speaking from within a particular moralview.

Conceptual conflict is endemic in our situation, because of the depth ofour moral conflicts. Each of us therefore has to choose both with whom wewish to be morally bound and by what ends, rules, and virtues we wish to beguided. These two choices are inextricably linked. . . . Speaking fromwithinmyownmoral vocabulary, I shall findmyself bound by the criteria embodiedin it. . . . Yet I must choose for myself with whom I am to be morally bound.I must choose between alternative forms of social and moral practice. Notthat I standmorally naked until I have chosen. For our social past determinesthat each of us has some vocabulary with which to frame and to make hischoice. (Short History, p. 268)

He puts the point even more pointedly when he says,

It follows that we are liable to find two kinds of people in our society:those who speak from within one of these surviving moralities, and thosewho stand outside all of them. Between the adherents of rival moralities andbetween the adherents of onemorality and the adherents of none there existsno court of appeal, no impersonal neutral standard. For those who speakfrom within a given morality, the connection between fact and valuationis established in virtue of the meanings of the words they use. To thosewho speak from without, those who speak from within appear merely tobe uttering imperatives which express their own liking and their privatechoices. The controversy between emotivism and prescriptivism on the onehand and their critics on the other thus expresses the fundamental moralsituation of our society. (Short History, p. 266)

In this discussion, MacIntyre seems primarily interested in combatingthe view that moral concepts are timeless and unhistorical, a view that heregards as giving support illegitimately to a range of “absolutist” views heldby philosophers as different as Jean-Paul Sartre, the British emotivists, andthe British naturalists. Emotivists and prescriptivists typically, according toMacIntyre,

try to absolutize their own individualist morality and that of the age, bymeans of an appeal to concepts, just as much as their critics try to absolutizetheir ownmoralities bymeans of an appeal to conceptual considerations. But

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these attempts could only succeed if moral concepts were indeed timelessand unhistorical and if there were only one available set of moral concepts.One virtue of the history of moral philosophy is that it shows us that thisis not true and that moral concepts themselves have a history. To under-stand this is to be liberated from any false absolutist claims. (Short History,p. 269)

These are the concluding words of the Short History and they again rep-resent an important MacIntyrean theme – that moral philosophers of allstripes, absolutist or skeptical, cognitivists or noncognitivists, frequently at-tempt to defend their views by appealing to some features of the conceptualstructure of moral thought and talk. MacIntyre has always contended thatsuch arguments that depend on the primacy of the conceptual in ethics fail.His claim is not that conceptual investigations are not important, but thatthey cannot be first philosophy in ethics. Concepts are prey to historicaldevelopment and philosophical transformations just as much as forms oflife and particular practices are. Moral language and styles of argument arejust one entree into understanding the moral life – an important way in,to be sure, but not the only way and certainly not a privileged way. Theinvestigations of historians and social scientists, as well as the imaginativeworks of literature that use these concepts, are as important as the bare ex-amination of the concepts. There is no privileged access to the structure ofmoral thought. Concepts always have a history and are subject to pressuresof various sorts.This general picture of metaethics that emerges in the Short History is

explored in muchmore detail and extended in important respects in a seriesof essays thatMacIntyre writes over the next five years or so and that appearin the second half of Against the Self-Images of the Age. In these essays, he isespecially concerned to come to grips with the prescriptivist views of R. M.Hare, who had inherited the noncognitivist mantle from Stevenson and theemotivists and who was the dominant figure in metaethics throughout thelate 1950s and 1960s. His criticisms of Hare focus – as one would expect –on Hare’s view that the two central semantic features of morally evalu-ative language are universalizability and prescriptivity. Hare argued thatone could identify these as the central semantic features of moral languagefrom a position that is neutral with regard to any substantive moral views.Hare also claimed that, while the results of this semantic investigation weremorally neutral (i.e., did not entail, even together with additional “factual”premises, any substantive moral views), these semantic facts about morallanguage nevertheless gave us access to a distinctive method of approaching


moral conflict and moral uncertainty that goes some way toward resolvingthese conflicts in a reasonable fashion.MacIntyre’s particular criticisms of this view (as found especially in

“WhatMorality IsNot” and “Imperatives, Reasons for Action andMorals”)are complex and subtle, but grow out of two central points. First, he con-tinues to argue, as we have seen above, that it is mistaken to suppose that“moral language” can be regarded as a timeless object of analysis existingoutside historical change and differences in social practice. Hare talks about“our moral concepts,” but MacIntyre argues that we must recognize the in-dexical character of this phrase. In support of this point, he discusses insome detail particular historical episodes (as he had already done in ShortHistory) in whichwe can seemoral language developing and changing underthe pressure of historical contingency and philosophical argument. Thereis no simple truth about “the” meaning of our moral concepts, and any at-tempt like Hare’s to defend some simple truth on this matter will substituteideology or conventional moral opinion for genuine semantic analysis.Second, MacIntyre argues that even if there were some hope of giving

“the” correct account of the meaning and use of moral language, Hare’sparticular attempt to characterize the meaning of moral language as essen-tially one of prescribing behavior or attitudes overlooks the rich variety ofuses of this language, even if we restrict ourselves to the uses of language incontemporary cultures. AsMacIntyre says, “there are a great variety of usesto which moral utterance may be put, none of which can claim the title of‘the’ function of moral valuation” (1957c, p. 101). He goes on to list “someof the tasks which even so familiar a form of moral judgment as ‘X oughtto do Y’ may be set.” These tasks include:

1. The expression of indignation or other violent or mild emotion.

2. The expression of commands or exhortations.

3. The appraisal of actions.

4. The giving of advice.

5. Persuasion.

6. The expression of one’s own principles.

MacIntyre comments after giving this list:

This incomplete catalogue of uses of “ought” in simple sentences suchas “X ought to do Y” has one main point: moral philosophy to date hasbeen insufficiently lexicographical. Even a partial enumeration of the dif-ferences already noted between first-, second-, and third-person uses of

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“ought” . . . should make us conscious of the need for a far wider range ofpatterns of analysis than any contemporary writer has so far offered. (1957c,p. 102)

It is important to note about this line of argument that MacIntyre isnot developing the kind of argument that was frequently brought againstHare and the metaethical tradition generally – the argument, that is, thatmetaethics was mistaken in placing semantic investigations at the heart ofethics, thereby diverting the attention of moral philosophy from its realconcerns, such as concerns to develop comprehensive normative theoriesor to discuss genuine moral dilemmas present in contemporary culture.MacIntyre’s grounds for objecting are rather that the semantic investiga-tions have not been done well enough – or as he puts it in the quotationabove, “moral philosophy to date has been insufficiently lexicographical.”Hare goes wrong not in aiming to clarify the meaning of moral and morebroadly evaluative language and, by doing so, to illuminate the structuresof moral argument; rather, he goes wrong in doing so badly. He is insuffi-ciently attentive to the historical changes in our moral language and to thevariety of uses of moral language. An adequate (“genuinely lexicographi-cal”) account of moral language would need to be more historically awareand more nuanced in its approach to the variegated uses of our vocabularyfor moral conversation and deliberation.MacIntyre goes some way in the direction of modeling a genuinely

lexicographical investigation of moral language in the work that followshis largely critical work of Hare. This later work, first introduced in tworemarkable articles, “Ought” and “Some More About ‘Ought’,” and thenlater developed in the opening chapters of After Virtue, attempts simulta-neously to illustrate what it would be to do genuine metaethics and why thedeep failures in metaethics in the twentieth-century are symptoms of im-portant features of our moral situation. MacIntyre’s concern in “Ought” isto investigate a particular case of metaethical disagreement – that betweenHarean prescriptivists and Footean naturalists – and to attempt to drawfrom this investigation some general lessons for thinking about procedurein metaethics. He is struck, as were many at this time, by the deep impassebetween these two views. Both prescriptivism and naturalism had beendeveloped and elaborated by able philosophers using highly sophisticatedarguments. Each was familiar with the other’s objections to the favoredview and armed with responses to these objections. The arguments for andagainst each view had been honed in countless philosophical articles andbeen tested in dialectical exchanges at philosophical meetings.


MacIntyre, writing in the early 1970s after this debate had been in fullswing for over a decade, is skeptical, however, that we are even in sight of aresolution to this dispute. While he admits that “there has been no lack ofpeacemakers attempting to patch up things between them,” he is confidentthat “no conclusive argument is found at any point in these exchanges; con-clusive, that is, in terms other than those of the party that propounds them”(1971d, p. 140). The reason for his confidence that, given the present termsof the dispute, no resolution of the disagreement will be forthcoming, isthat each of the sides in this disagreement are so expert at redescribingthe facts that would resolve this disagreement – and redescribing them, ofcourse, in a fashion that tends to support the favored conclusions of theirside. Prescriptivists, in developing their arguments, are allowed to describethe “linguistic facts” in a way favorable to their view of the conceptuallandscape, while naturalists play the same game from their quite differ-ent naturalistic perspective. Given this situation, MacIntyre argues that itfollows that

if the argument between prescriptivism and naturalism is not to be an emptyand pointless contest, which has by the very virtuosity of the contestants inthe performance of the task of redescription been deprived of that indepen-dent subject matter, the characterization of which was the sole point of thewhole enterprise, one prerequisite is that as far as possible both theories arematched against the facts, so far as these can be independently delineated,and the tendency to redescribe the facts in accordance with the require-ments of the rival theories must be curbed as far as possible. (MacIntyre1971d, 141)

MacIntyre’s suggestion, then, is that the seemingly interminable dis-putes within metaethics in twentieth-century Anglophone moral philos-ophy can be settled only if we can hold these theories up to the facts,“independently delineated,” where independence is to be understood as in-dependence from the presuppositions and biases of the contending theories.But what could be this perspective, independent of improper philosophicalinfluence, that might serve as the neutral arbiter in these debates? Not sur-prisingly, MacIntyre opts for a historically and sociologically sophisticatedlexicography. What is required, that is, is that we approach

the linguistic facts at first as much as possible in the mode of the lexicog-rapher rather than of the philosopher; by next setting the linguistic factsin their social contexts; and finally by asking whether this does not en-able us to discriminate, in relation to the theories of both prescriptivism

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and naturalism, the types of moral situation of which each doctrine is thenatural and convincing explanation and analysis from the types of moralsituation which one or the other doctrine has to distort. In so doing weshall treat these doctrines as hypotheses, which invoke a stylized model ofargument to explain the actual patterns of moral speech and controversy.(MacIntyre 1971d, p. 141)

In both “Ought” and “Some More About ‘Ought’,” MacIntyre strivesto put on the table some of the sociological and historical materials thatwill open up the kind of genuinely lexicographical investigation that hehas argued will be necessary if progress in settling metaethical disputes isto be possible. In “Ought” he introduces and develops in great detail ataxonomy of uses of ‘ought’ rooted in close attention to social practicesand historical contingencies. He suggests that there are three stages in theuse of the English word ‘ought’: “a first in which ‘ought’ and ‘owe’ areindistinguishable; a second in which ‘ought’ has become an auxiliary verb,useable with an infinitive to give advice; and a third in which the use of‘ought’ has become unconditional”(MacIntyre 1971d, p. 143). He furthersuggests that there are particular social contexts inwhich these different usesof ‘ought’ most naturally find their home and within which the nuances oftheir usage can be examined.He looks in some detail at the Icelandic cultureof the Norse sagas as a place where linguistic equivalences of our ‘ought’never go beyond his first stage of usage, the culture of classical Greece as aplace where usage never goes beyond the second stage, and modern culturewhere “it is only perhaps that we have ‘oughts’ of all three stages markedby the dictionary” (MacIntyre 1971d, p. 152). MacIntyre’s discussions ofthe different social contexts in which these usages of ‘ought’ most naturallyfind their homes is subtle and detailed, and it is impossible to summarize itbriefly without oversimplification.The main conclusion of this discussion of relevance to MacIntyre’s

general attitude toward metaethical disagreement, however, is that“naturalism and prescriptivism are most plausibly understood not as rivalaccounts of the whole field of moral or even of evaluative discourse, but asaccounts of different types of moral and evaluative discourse” (MacIntyre1971d, p. 154). Oversimplifying grandly, we can say that MacIntyre’sclaim is that neither naturalism nor prescriptivism can adequately accountfor the first stage of ‘ought’, that naturalistic theories give a plausibleaccount of the second stage of ‘ought’, and that prescriptivist theories givea plausible account of the decayed form of the third stage of ‘ought’. But


since both views claim to give an adequate account of ‘ought’ simpliciter,both are wrong. MacIntyre rejects not only the metaethical views of theprescriptivist but also those of their naturalistic rivals – and he rejects themboth for the same general reason. They are one-sided in their focus ona narrow range of examples and fail to appreciate the full complexity ofthe use of moral language in modernity. Of the naturalists who refuse totake seriously the late-developing, unconditional ‘ought’, he says, “Thenursery, like classical Greece or medieval Europe, is one of the naturalhomes of naturalism. But societies change and people grow up” (MacIntyre1971d, 154).His criticisms of the prescriptivists, however, are even harsher. In

“Some More About ‘Ought’,” he focuses on the unconditional ‘ought’of modernity, especially as it appears in the secularized moral vocabularyof ninteenth-century moral earnestness and is canonically analyzed inPrichard. Of this ‘ought’, MacIntyre argues that it is so cut off from thepresuppositions that could have made its use intelligible that it can at mostexpress a kind of superstition and be used to bully and deceive. Of the“Prichardian or distinctively moral ‘ought’, ” MacIntyre says, it

was a ghost and it is a ghost that still walks in certain quarters, althoughmoreand more obviously, like other ghosts, a survival. Yet so long as it survives,morality involves a degree of bluff and deception that can only have theeffect of engendering cynicism whenever it is once more expressed. Thispaper is therefore not only an attempt at analysis; it is also hopefully anexorcism. (MacIntyre 1971f, pp. 171–172)

Prescriptivist views – and noncognitivist views, in general – go wrong inthat, while they correctly diagnose intuitionist expressions of the moral‘ought’ as mere bluff and deception, they replace the mistaken views of thePrichardian intuitionists with the view that all attempts to give ‘ought’ judg-ments a cognitive role are equally mistaken. MacIntyre says of Stevenson’semotivist view on this score what he might well have said about Hare’sprescriptivism: “His theory is not a true theory of moral utterance, but atrue theory of intuitionist moral utterance, if we understand by intuition-ism not merely the doctrine of a group of philosophers, but the doctrineof a social milieu” (MacIntyre 1971f, p. 171). So in the end, prescrip-tivists attempt to elevate to a general account of the meaning of ‘ought’a true account of the meaning of ‘ought’ as it is confusedly used by certainmoderns, while naturalists attempt to elevate to a general account of the

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meaning of ‘ought’ a true account of a certain usage of ‘ought’ at homein classical Greek culture and the contemporary nursery. Both theoriesare right about something, but neither is right about what it claims to beright about. Both views aspire to give a general account of the meaningof moral concepts and to draw from this account general methodologicalguidelines for moral argument and deliberation. But both fail through theirparochial attention to only certain usages of ourmoral vocabulary, and bothdefend approaches to moral argument that can only appear as one-sidedand out of touch with the real cultural situation of contemporary moraldiscussion.MacIntyre’smetaethical journey fromhis first groping approach to these

problems in his master’s thesis to the sophisticated historical and sociologi-cal discussions in “Ought” and “SomeMoreAbout ‘Ought’ ” is one inwhichthe results of his work are largely negative. He argues that both the partic-ular metaethical views on offer in contemporary philosophy and the wholeenterprise of an ahistorical metaethics are mistaken. Although he producessome examples of what a sufficiently rich lexicography might be in these ar-ticles in Self-Images, it is clear that the investigations he is there undertakinggo beyond the bounds of anything that can any longer be called metaethics.These developments in his views ofmetaethics throughout the 1950s and upto the 1970s are simultaneous with his intellectual engagements with con-temporary Marxism, contemporary theology, and contemporary psycho-analysis and the therapeutic professions more generally. He also exploresissues in action theory and the philosophy of the social sciences during thisperiod. Although these investigations are explored in other chapters in thisvolume, we must note here that they all come together in a powerful wayin After Virtue, which MacIntyre was writing in the 1970s. In this book –clearly the most important and influential statement of MacIntyre’s viewsup until its publication – results from his metaethical investigations cometogether with views he had developed in other areas of his work in an expo-sition and defense of a radical attack on most of what constitutes modernmoral philosophy and in the beginning of a constructive account of a newkind of moral philosophy. In some sense, the narrowly metaethical investi-gations of the first quarter century of MacIntyre’s work are left behind inhis work in After Virtue and later, but in another sense that work is takenup into a larger synthesis of thought. This synthesis moves MacIntyre’swork quite radically from the metaethical context in which it began intothe context of the disputes among comprehensive normative theories thatcome back to center stage in moral philosophy with the publication of JohnRawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971.


2. NORMATIVE ETHICS

When After Virtue appeared in 1981, the revolution in normative theoryhad been underway for a decade or so. JohnRawls and his students had beenthe primary proponents of a sophisticated and updated Kantian rationalismthat aimed to provide a philosophical foundation for liberal-democraticpolitical systems and to address some of the social dislocations of the 1960s.New forms of consequentialism were also developed by a number of moralphilosophers, especially students of Hare’s such as Derek Parfit and PeterSinger,who seemed tounderstandbeforeHaredid that his allegedlymorallyneutral metaethical theory had mutated into a consequentialist normativetheory. The revival of these Kantian and consequentialist theories seemedto many philosophers to exhaust the normative possibilities. Just as themetaethical field had been dominated by the impasse between naturalismand prescriptivism, it appeared that the normative possibilities would beexhausted by broadly deontological and consequentialist possibilities.It is one of the main themes of After Virtue that this picture of the

normative landscape as divided between warring deontological and con-sequentialist alternatives is deeply flawed. In contrast, MacIntyre arguesthat the contending deontological and consequentialist normative theoriesare themselves to be understood as the decayed forms of Enlightenmentethical theories that share much in common. In developing these views,he deploys a complex set of considerations – historical, sociological, andconceptual – that permanently expand the repertoire of contemporary eth-ical theory. The appearance of After Virtue clearly marks a critical momentin MacIntyre’s philosophical development. In the synthesis of his viewspresented there, he draws together a number of strands of his thought de-veloped over the previous thirty years and molds them into a powerful andcomprehensive attack on central features of modern culture and the styleof moral philosophy dominant within it.In the twenty years since the publication of After Virtue, MacIntyre has

refined and extended the comprehensive view first deployed there. InWhoseJustice? Which Rationality?, he refines his historical account of the develop-ment of ethics in a number of different ways and develops a comprehensiveaccount of how rational dialogue among competing traditions of normativethought can occur. In Three Rival Versions, he applies some of the lessonstaught in Whose Justice? to examine in detail the arguments among threeparticular traditions of ethical thought – the genealogist, the encyclopedist,and the traditionalist. In his most recent book, Dependent Rational Animals,he turns to a more detailed account of the human good and the virtues

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associated with it. In all three of these books, he does not hesitate to correctmistakes he acknowledges in his earlier work and to take his view in direc-tions that seem to depart from earlier statements, but he is for the mostpart still filling in the outlines of the comprehensive view first adumbratedin After Virtue. It is the urtext for MacIntyre’s later work.A natural way to begin a discussion of MacIntyre’s mature contribution

to normative ethics would be to sort out the central questions and concernsof contemporary normative ethics, to examineMacIntyre’s answers to thesequestions, and to compare them with the answers given by his main com-petitors in the contemporary dialogue. Since the normative revolution inmoral philosophy began some thirty years ago, there has developed a certaincanonical view of the field and its central questions into which some havetried to fit MacIntyre in this way. The received story (vastly oversimplified)goes something like this. There are four central contending positions inthe arena of normative ethics: (1) a deontological view, rooted in Kantianrationalism or some form of contractarianism, which gives priority to theright over the good and places rules in a privileged place at the heart ofnormative theory; (2) a broadly consequentialist view, which places the no-tion of maximizing good states of affairs in the privileged place at the heartof normative theory; (3) virtue ethics, rooted in some broadly Aristotelianor Humean conception of the virtues, which places the notion of a virtueand the companion notions of human flourishing or well functioning at theheart of normative theory; and (4) anti-theory with regard to ethics, whichis skeptical of the ambitions of any of these views and skeptical especiallyof the claims of moral philosophy to be able to vindicate rationally somesubstantive conception of the good life for humans.The contemporary literature in moral philosophy is replete with de-

velopments and slight variations of this taxonomy, and the standard intro-ductions to normative ethics explore the arguments and counterargumentsbrought by proponents of one or another of these normative conceptionsagainst their rivals. Normative ethics is largely constituted by this set ofpositions and debates, and to characterize someone’s views in normativeethics is to locate them within this framework. Like all taxonomies of areasof inquiry or academic debate, this one gains plausibility from the fact thatit no longer merely describes the landscape in normative ethics but alsofunctions normatively to guide discussions. It is not part of the purpose ofthis chapter to criticize this received view of the field of normative ethics,but it is important to notice that MacIntyre’s views do not fit neatly intoit. He is frequently identified as a proponent of virtue ethics, but many ofthose whose views are regarded as instances of virtue ethics are wary of his


views – and rightly so. Unlike the idealized virtue theorist of the canonicalview, MacIntyre gives rules a central place and returns to the topic of theplace of rules in an adequate theory repeatedly. He is also frequently iden-tified as an anti-theorist, but his strong commitment to moral realism andhis rejection of postmodernist perspectivist and relativist views put him atodds with many others characterized in this way, although he shares manyof the anti-theorists’ critical views of the pretensions ofmuch contemporarynormative theory.If one cannot find a way into MacIntyre’s views on normative ethics

by locating him within the textbook categories in normative ethics, howshould one proceed? Without claiming that it is the only way, or even thebest way, I will proceed by examining the broad outline of the views that hedeploys in After Virtue and develops in his later works. With this outline inplace, we can turn briefly to some critical remarks on the overall shape ofMacIntyre’s project.

After Virtue begins and ends on an apocalyptic note. It opens with anevocation of a picture of contemporary culture as one of moral and ethicalfragments, the product of some cultural disaster, now forgotten by most,but one which was responsible for the current disordered state of moral dis-course in contemporary culture.7 This disordered state, though invisible tothe untrained eye, is most in evidence in the deep moral disagreements thatcharacterize contemporary moral discussions.8 MacIntyre examines threeareas of moral dispute in contemporary culture – debates over the moralcharacter of war, of abortion, and of economic justice – and argues that ineach case valid arguments of various sorts can be brought for a variety ofconflicting positions on each of these issues. Though these arguments arevalid, their premises differ and are in fact incommensurable and drawn fromdifferent historical sources. The depth of moral disagreement endemicto contemporary culture, and the failure of the standard techniques forresolving these disagreements, are the primary data forMacIntyre’s analysisof contemporary culture and for the approach to normative ethical theorythat rests on this analysis. Those theorists who disagree with MacIntyreabout this matter will find much of what he claims to follow from itunconvincing.MacIntyre argues that there are four different responses one might

make to his claims about the depth of moral disagreement. One might, ofcourse, simply deny that moral disagreement is as deep and irresolvable ashe suggests. This would be, on his view, simply to deny the obvious. Second,one might agree with his description but argue that this is always and in-evitably the case, since the expression of moral views is simply a matter of

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the expression of moral attitudes that are a function of one’s upbringing andthe social forces impinging on one. Even if there were agreement in theseattitudes it would be merely a contingent matter, but, given the complexityand diversity of environments within which human beings are socialized,we should not expect such convergence. Since this second response is thatfavored by emotivists and other noncognitivists who had been so influentialin the metaethical debates earlier in the century, we can call it the emotivistresponse. Third, one might admit that moral disagreement is deep, butdeny that it is impossible to rise above these disagreements, and appeal tocertain rational principles, available to everyone, with the capacity to bringagreement on even themost contestedmoral disputes. The resources of theEnlightenment moral theories, Kantian rationalism, or Benthamite conse-quentialism would be the prime examples of such theories that attempt, asit were, to put the fragments back together. The contemporary resurgenceof normative theory (and its extension into the area of applied ethics) bearswitness to the fact that this hope is alive and well in contemporary culture.This response might be called the Enlightenment Response. Finally, onecan claim, asMacIntyre does, that the current state ofmoral disagreement isas he described it, but that it is neither a universal feature of ethical discourseas the emotivist claims, nor a problem remediable by the proper applicationof normative ethical theory as neoKantians and consequentialists claim. Itis rather a particular malady of contemporary culture to be explained by thehistory of this culture that will vindicate the “fragmentation thesis.” Moraldisagreement is so deep and so little amenable to the techniques of rationaldiscussion because discussants are beginning with ill-assorted fragments ofa traditional, largely coherent approach whose coherence was shattered bycertain events in the history of modernity. This approach need not denythat there are more or less rational ways of holding and defending onesmoral views. It must, however, deny that these rational techniques are ofthe sort favored by the Enlightenment response.The agenda of MacIntyre’s ethics is set by this picture of contemporary

moral disagreement and the cultural and philosophical responses to it. Themajor themes in his later views on ethics emerge from his attempt to vindi-cate this picture of moral disagreement and also to defend an appropriateresponse to it. MacIntyre says that the two major tasks of After Virtue are todefend his particular characterization ofmodernity as a culture of fragmentsand incommensurable disagreement and to “identify and describe the lostmorality of the past and evaluate its claims to objectivity and authority”(After Virtue, p. 22). The sweep of MacIntyre’s argument in carrying outthese tasks is breathtaking and its details and nuances far exceed the capacity


of this survey paper to capture. It is important to look, however briefly, atthe manner in which MacIntyre pursues these two tasks.

MacIntyre’s Characterization of Modern Culture

Aswe noted above,MacIntyre takes the fact of fundamental and incommen-surablemoral disagreement to be themost obvious feature of contemporarymoral discourse. We have also seen, however, that he rejects the emotivistview that attempts to explain this moral disagreement by defending theview that the meaning of moral terms is exhausted by their role in express-ing speakers’ attitudes and evoking similar attitudes in others. While herejects emotivism as an account of the meaning of moral terms (and drawson familiar arguments in the literature to do so), he argues that emotivismis an accurate portrayal of the use of moral terms, at least within certaindominant social groups in contemporary culture. While moral terms re-tain a meaning that allows them to assert moral claims that enjoy a certainindependent and objective force, they are typically used in contemporaryculture simply to express subjective aims.9 There is a tension then in the useof moral language in contemporary culture between an objective meaningand an emotivist use. MacIntyre characterizes what such a tension in thecontemporary use of moral language would be like in the following way:

The meaning and use of moral expressions were, or at the very least hadbecome, radically discrepant with each other. Meaning and use would beat odds in such a way that meaning would tend to conceal use. We couldnot safely infer what someone who uttered a moral judgment was doingmerely by listening to what he said. Moreover the agent himself might wellbe among those for whom use was concealed by meaning. He might well,precisely because he was self-conscious about the meaning of the wordsthat he used, be assured that he was appealing to independent impersonalcriteria, when all that he was in fact doing was expressing his feelings toothers in a manipulative way. (After Virtue, p. 14)

MacIntyre argues for this complex condition of moral language inmodernity in two different ways. He argues against the emotivist account ofmeaning using standard philosophical arguments familiar in themetaethicaldiscussions; he argues for the emotivist account of use by developing a com-prehensive picture of contemporary social life that can only be explained,he thinks, if we live in an emotivist culture in which moral terms are char-acteristically used simply to express one’s attitudes in a manipulative way.Since “every moral philosophy presupposes a sociology,” all genuine moral

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philosophies must be capable of being socially embodied, and every societywill embody some moral philosophy. And he claims that a close examina-tion of contemporary culture suggests that it socially embodies emotivism,even if the moral language we use in contemporary culture retains a kind ofmeaning that suggests impersonality and objectivity in ourmoral discourse.MacIntyre argues that the key mark of an emotivist culture is “the fact

that emotivism entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction betweenmanipulative and nonmanipulative social relations” (After Virtue, p. 23). Ifmoral expressions are used simply to express my attitudes and to shape theattitudes of others, it is difficult to see how this distinction could be drawn.The primary indication that contemporary culture has indeed obliteratedthis distinction is the central role played in it by certain social roles – calledby MacIntyre “characters” – that function “to morally legitimate a mode ofsocial existence” (After Virtue, p. 29).10 MacIntyre identifies the characterscentral to contemporary culture as the manager, the therapist, and the aes-thete, and argues that those who embody those roles fail to acknowledgethe distinction between manipulative and nonmanipulative behavior. As heputs it, “In our own time emotivism is a theory embodied in characters whoall share the emotivist view of the distinction between rational and non-rational discourse, but who represent the embodiment of that distinctionin very different social contexts” (After Virtue, p. 30).The emotivist character of contemporary culture also shows itself in

the concept of the self widely accepted by many prominent contemporarytheorists. MacIntyre says of this self:

The specifically modern self, the self that I have called emotivist, finds nolimits set to that on which it may pass judgment for such limits could onlyderive from rational criteria for evaluation and, as we have seen, the emo-tivist self lacks any such criteria. Everythingmay be criticized fromwhateverstandpoint the self has adopted, including the self’s choice of standpoint toadopt. It is in this capacity of the self to evade any necessary identificationwith any particular contingent state of affairs that some modern philoso-phers, both analytical and existentialist, have seen the essence of moralagency. (After Virtue, p. 34)

MacIntyre argues that it can only seem plausible to take this concept of theself as the essence of moral agency if our culture is indeed emotivist.MacIntyre’s detailed historical account of modern moral philosophy is

also intended to provide further support for the claim that contemporaryculture is an emotivist culture. This history is primarily intended to exploretwo differentmatters – first, howwe came to be in the fragmented condition


in which we find ourselves, and second, why the Enlightenment theories,which were intended to address our modern difficulties, not only failed buthad to fail.In Chapters 4–6 of After Virtue, leading up to the hinge chapter entitled

“Nietzsche or Aristotle,” he gives an account of the history of modernmoral philosophy in reverse order, beginning with Kierkegaard andmovingbackward through the Enlightenment project and its predecessors. TheEnlightenment project was flawed from its inception in that it set itselfa task that could not be carried out. It was asked to put back together apuzzle in which certain pieces were missing; indeed, it was a condition ofany adequate solution to this puzzle that it proceed without the missingpieces.In this historical account, he argues that both Kantian rationalism and

Humean desire-based ethics – the two main instances of an Enlightenmentmorality – grow out of a breakdown in a classical synthesis that founda justification for moral rules in a structure that combined (in its mostcomplete form in the Thomist synthesis) a rich teleological conception ofhuman life together with a notion of Divine Law. The forces unleashed bythe scientific revolution and the Reformation, however, made this justifi-catory structure untenable. Our ability to know and act in accord with thedivine law was denied by the voluntarism of the Protestant reformers andtheir acceptance of a strong doctrine of original sin, while the teleologicalconception of nature at the heart of the classical conception of human lifewas abandoned with the acceptance of the new mechanistic science. Withthese classical props for themoral rules no longer available, it was inevitablethat some alternative structure for justifying the moral rules should besought, and the Humean and Kantian constructions are the fruits of thissearch.MacIntyre argues that these Enlightenment responses had to fail pre-

cisely because the project of the Enlightenment with regard to the justifica-tion ofmoral rules was incoherent. Themoral rules that the Enlightenmenttheories aimed to justify were crafted as corrective devices for human natureas we find it. They arose as devices for perfecting human beings whose nat-ural state is imperfect in various ways. The perfective process (whether inAristotle’s pagan view or in Aquinas’s Christian one) involved a movementtoward an idealized end of human life – a movement toward the humangood. It was only within a broadly teleological conception of human lifethat such a conception of the moral rules was coherent. In the absence ofsome rich notion of perfected humanity – a notion underwritten by clas-sical teleology and the notion of divine law – the only remaining basis for

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grounding the moral rules are features of human nature in its unperfectedstate. The major Enlightenment views accordingly attempted to anchormoral rules either in the structures of our passions (an option taken byHume and his followers) or in the structure of reason (an option taken byKant and his followers). It is the final breakdown of these attempts – seenclearly by Kierkegaard andNietzsche – that explains the fragmented natureof contemporary moral discourse.MacIntyre ends his description of the moral fragmentation of contem-

porary culture and his historical explanation of this fragmentation withthe presentation of a stark alternative for contemporary moral theorists –Aristotle or Nietzsche? This question grows out of the claims in the firsthalf of After Virtue about the lessons to be learned from the careful ex-amination of the history of modern moral philosophy. He claims to haveshown that the only defensible views in moral philosophy are a returnto the broadly Aristotelian conception of ethics or a Nietzchean view.Nietzsche, MacIntyre claims, saw clearly the utter failure of the ambitionsof Enlightenment moralists like Kant and Hume. He also thought thattheir failure gave us reason to reject any attempt at a rational vindicationof morality. MacIntyre describes the position of the moral philosopher inlate modernity in this way:

The defensibility of theNietzschean position turns in the end on the answerto the question: was it right in the first place to reject Aristotle? For ifAristotle’s position in ethics and politics – or something very like it – couldbe sustained, the whole Nietzschean enterprise would be pointless. This isbecause the power of Nietzsche’s position depends upon the truth of onecentral thesis: that all rational vindications of morality manifestly fail andthat belief in the tenets of morality needs to be explained in terms of a set ofrationalizations which conceal the fundamentally non-rational phenomenaof the will. My own argument obliges me to agree with Nietzsche that thephilosophers of the Enlightenment never succeeded in providing groundsfor doubting his central thesis: his epigrams are even deadlier than hisextended arguments. But, if my earlier argument is correct, that failureitself was nothing other than an historical sequel to the rejection of theAristotelian tradition. And thus the key question does indeed become: canAristotle’s ethics, or something very like it, after all be vindicated? (AfterVirtue, pp. 117–18)

In asking us to choose between Aristotle and Nietzsche, of course,MacIntyre does not intend us to focus narrowly on the writings of these twophilosophers. He treats each of them as types. Aristotle “provides a central


point of focus for the tradition of the virtues which held the resources ofa whole tradition of acting, thinking and discourse of which Aristotle’s isonly a part, a tradition of which I spoke earlier as ‘the classical tradition’ andwhose view ofman I called ‘the classical view ofman’ ” (After Virtue, p. 119).In the same way, Nietzsche represents the tradition of emotivist and exis-tentialist interpreters of morality. So instead of Nietzsche versus Aristotle,one could regard this choice as one between the classical tradition in moralphilosophy and those forms of emotivism, existentialism, constructivism,and postmodernism that are sowidely defendedwithin contemporarymoralphilosophy.The first half of After Virtue presents the negative pole of MacIntyre’s

moral theory. He develops and defends a comprehensive picture of thestate of contemporary social life as it is lived out in groups dominated bythe thoughts and attitudes characteristic of late modernity. He also seeks toidentify and discuss in some detail the moral philosophy that he argues isembodied in this culture. Finally, he relates a complicated history ofmodernsocial life and of modern moral philosophy that aims to explain how wearrived at the thoughts and attitudes that we characteristically display. Healso believes that he has demonstrated in this discussion why the two mostprominent normative theories on offer in academic moral philosophy –consequentialism and Kantian rationalism – not only fail, but must fail. Ifhe is right in all this, the stark optionhe leaves uswith at the endofChapter 9is real. Either the failure of theEnlightenment normative theoriesmakewayfor aNietzscheanmorality of self-assertion, or wemust find a way to restatein a rationally defensible way the classical Aristotelian ethics of virtue, therejection of which in earlier centuries inspired the Enlightenment optionsthat have, in turn, failed. He turns to this further task in the second half ofAfter Virtue.

MacIntyre’s Defense of the Aristotelian Alternative

The hinge chapter of After Virtue is followed by another historical accountof the tradition of the virtues, told in a forward sequence this time and takingus from an account of the virtues in heroic society, through the developmentof the virtues in classical Greece and in Christian Europe, up to their emer-gence in slightly transformed form in modernity. We need only note herethat this account of the history of the virtues demonstrates that there areenormous differences in treatments of the virtues in this tradition. Differ-ent lists of virtues are found within the tradition, but, most importantly, soare alternative accounts of what a virtue is. MacIntyre is struck especially by

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the deep divergence among the accounts of virtues found in heroic culture,in which virtues are those properties of human agents that allow them todischarge their social roles; the accounts in classical and Christian culture,in which virtues are properties necessary for human beings to achieve theirtelos, either natural or supernatural; and the account of the virtues of suchtypical moderns as Benjamin Franklin, for whom virtues are regarded asinstrumental means for achieving worldly or heavenly success. The ques-tion raised for MacIntyre by this diversity is, “are we or are we not able todisentangle from these rival and various claims a unitary core concept ofthe virtues of which we can give a more compelling account than any ofthe other accounts so far?” (After Virtue, p. 186). Since MacIntyre hasorganized the second half of After Virtue around the project of recon-structing the core of the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues, it is essentialthat he demonstrate that there is a unifying core underneath this surfacediversity.MacIntyre believes that such a unifying account is possible and gives a

schematic account of it in the remaining chapters. While he regards thisunifying account as being expressive of the tradition of the virtues of whichAristotle was the most prominent advocate, his idealized account departsfrom Aristotle in a number of different ways. Most important, MacIntyresuggests that an updated account of the virtues will have to dispense withAristotle’s metaphysical biology – the metaphysical theory which providesthe heart of the teleological account of nature, the loss of which is largelyresponsible for bringing about the crisis in the classical picture of morality.He also recognizes that he will have to reject Aristotle’s commitment tothe unity of the virtues and his commitment to the Greek polis as the onlyadequate setting for the virtues.Macintyre’s general strategy for developing a broadly Aristotelian ac-

count of the virtues is to locate the virtues in a socially constituted contextnow that the metaphysical basis for the traditional Aristotelian conceptionis no longer available. The social context is constituted by three levels ofsocial organization – those of human practices, the narrative unity of hu-man life, and the traditions in which our lives are embedded. Although thischapter cannot examine in detail each of these notions, it is important tonotice that each situates the choices of human beings in a framework muchricher than that in which the emotivist self of late modernity operates.MacIntyre’s proposal to define the virtues by locating them within

these layered contexts is the key to his defense of the broadly Aristotelianalternative to Nietzschean self-assertion. Although each of these notionsis discussed in great detail by MacIntyre, we can here only comment on


their main features and their significance for his overall project. Practicesare defined by MacIntyre in one of the most well-known – not to saynotorious – sentences in After Virtue:

By a practice I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of sociallyestablished cooperative human activity throughwhich goods internal to thatform of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those stan-dards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, thatform of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence,and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematicallyextended. (After Virtue, p. 187)

Examples of practices given byMacIntyre are farming, physics, politics, andother similarly complicated spheres of human activity. Of first importanceis MacIntyre’s claim that practices make possible the achievement ofgoods internal to them. In contrast to what he calls “external” goods – forexample, money, status, and prestige – internal goods are not objects ofcompetition and can be recognized as goods – and realized – only by thosewho fully participate in practices. Virtues are required for full participationin practices in order (1) to define our relation to others within practices,(2) to define our relation to past participants, and (3) to allow us to resistthe corruption of practices by institutions. At this first level, then, virtuesare to be understood as those dispositions to act that allow us to participatefully in practices and to achieve the goods internal to them.The notion of a practice, however, is not sufficient to fully define a

virtue. We may need to criticize a particular practice or to understand howparticipation in it might contribute to the overall good of a human life.MacIntyre is particularly insistent that a good human life is not just partic-ipation in a series of arbitrarily chosen practices. These difficulties movethe discussion to the second level of the social underpinning of the virtues.MacIntyre argues that contemporary culture, as well as contemporary phi-losophy, encourages us to think of a human life as a mere series of episodesconnected by the thinnest sort of physical and psychological continuity.He suggests that we should rather regard the unity of a human life as thenarrative unity of a quest. In developing this notion, MacIntyre draws onthe medieval notion of a quest in which the object is not determined by afully specified or well-defined end but is itself a quest for the good life forman. But what is this good life? MacIntyre defines it as “the life spent inseeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seekingare those which will enable us to understand what more and what else thegood life for man is” (After Virtue, p. 219).

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Practices and the narrative unity of a life, however, are still insufficientto provide a full setting for the virtues. Both practices and the forms ofnarrative quest that give unity to our lives have histories, and the histori-cal background for these features of the social setting for human lives areorganized into traditions. MacIntyre defines a tradition as “an historicallyextended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in partabout the goods which constitute that tradition” (After Virtue, p. 222), andhe argues that virtues are necessary to sustain traditions and to govern ourrelation to them.11

MacIntyre’s account of the virtues, then, which he claims captures theheart of theAristotelian traditionwhile eschewingAristotle’s resort tometa-physical biology, is constituted by this layered involvement of the virtuesin the contents of practices, narrative unity, and tradition. He sums up thisaccount in the following way:

The virtues find their point and purpose not only in sustaining those re-lationships necessary if the variety of goods internal to practices are to beachieved and not only in sustaining the form of an individual life in whichthat individual may seek out his or her good as the good of his or her wholelife, but also in sustaining those traditions which provide both practices andindividual lives with their necessary historical context. (After Virtue, p. 223)

This account of the layered social world of practice, narrative unity, andtradition is not intended merely to provide a frame for the virtues. It is alsointended to provide an alternative sociology to that of the emotivist cultureMacIntyre had depicted in the first half of the book. In an important sense,he opposes his social world of practice, narrative unity, and tradition to thesocialworld of themanager, the therapist, and the aesthete. But if he has nowgiven content to the stark option that stands at the hinge of After Virtue –Nietzsche or Aristotle? – what are the crucial arguments for determiningwhich option to pick? How do we determine the superior view? How caneither view rationally vindicate itself?12 There are, of course, throughouthis work a number of particular arguments brought for or against particularpositions implicated either in the Nietzschean position or the Aristotelian,but MacIntyre admits at the end of After Virtue that he lacks the resourcesin this book for fully defending his favored Aristotelian option. He arguesthat if philosophical disputes are to be settled it is necessary to stand backfrom the disputes and

ask in a systematic way what the appropriate rational procedures are for set-tling this particular kind of dispute. It is my own view that the time has comeonce more when it is imperative to perform this task for moral philosophy;


but I do not pretend to have embarked upon it in this present book. Mynegative and positive evaluations of particular arguments do indeed pre-suppose a systematic, although here unstated, account of rationality. (AfterVirtue, p. 260)

MacIntyre takes up this task in work subsequent to After Virtue, es-pecially in the final hundred pages of Whose Justice? He develops therea comprehensive account of what he calls tradition-based inquiry that hethinks best captures the “appropriate rational procedures” applicable to thedeepest disputes in moral philosophy. This account of rationality is dis-cussed in some detail in another chapter in this volume, but I will turn tosome critical discussion of it in the final section of this chapter.

3. CRITICAL QUESTIONS

Although we have hardly done justice to the full complexity of MacIntyre’streatment of ethics (indeed, one might argue that even he has not donefull justice to it) I would like to turn in this final section to some criticalresponse. But first we should note how enormously successful in many re-spects MacIntyre’s contribution to moral philosophy has been. After Virtuehas been one of the best-selling books of academic philosophy in the last halfcentury, and its influence, along with the additional impact of MacIntyre’smore recent work, has been as considerable as the number of books sold.MacIntyre’s attempt to weave his philosophical theses together with an his-torical account of modern ethics has surely been one of the major forcesturning the attention of other moral philosophers to the history of theirsubject. The vigorous and high-quality scholarly work done in the historyof ethics in the last two decades has been spurred to a considerable extent, Ibelieve, by the desire either to correct what are perceived as the weaknessesin MacIntyre’s account or to support his interpretations. In this respect,MacIntyre’s influence on the history of ethics is much like the influenceof Thomas Kuhn (1962) on the history of science. Like Kuhn, MacIntyreforced others to do careful history in order to defend their own claimsagainst his attacks. After MacIntyre one can no longer defend a compre-hensive normative theory responsibly without relating one’s defense to thehistory of the subject.13

Hiswork has also been one of themajor forces in turning the attention ofmoral philosophers to a closer focus on the virtues and their history. In doingthis, he follows the lead of others, notably Anscombe and Geach, but it wasMacIntyremore than anyone elsewhobrought the importanceof the virtues

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to the attention of the broader culture. His work has also been enormouslyinfluential outside the narrow world of academic moral philosophy. His im-pact on contemporary moral theology, as well as social and political theory,has been especially important. Although he has attempted to disassociatehis views from a number of popularizing movements – especially that asso-ciated with certain popular forms of communitarianism (see, for example,MacIntyre 1991b and 1995a) – his work continues to be invoked in sup-port of a number of political, social, and religious agendas. It is difficult toname an Anglophone moral philosopher writing in the second half of thetwentieth century, other than John Rawls, whose influence on the broaderculture has been as great as that of MacIntyre.Despite this influence,MacIntyre has found few disciples who follow his

lead as closely as do the students of such other contemporary figures as JohnRawls and Derek Parfit. It is part of his view, of course, that if he is rightin his analysis of contemporary culture and the role of moral philosophersin it, one should expect his view to be widely rejected.14 Whether or nothe is right about this claim, it is certainly the case that his views in moralphilosophy have been met with a wide range of criticism. While our taskin this chapter is not to survey comprehensively this critical response, andcertainly not to contribute to it or defend MacIntyre against it (especiallysince he has done such a good job of taking care of himself in these matters),a quick examination of some of the most important criticism of his viewseems essential to understanding it.Although there are many quite detailed studies of MacIntyre’s account

of the history of ethics15 as well as of his account of particular matters suchas the nature of practices and traditions, or the good for human beings, I willfocus here on two broad responses to his overarching views in moral phi-losophy developed sinceAfter Virtue.16 The first line of criticism is aimed atMacIntyre’s negative appraisal of contemporary culture and the moral phi-losophy embodied in it, while the second raises questions aboutMacIntyre’spositive defense of his alternative to emotivist and Enlightenment modelsof ethical theory. The first objection claims that MacIntyre’s account of thecharacter of contemporary culture and, in particular, the disordered stateof moral discourse is simply wrong. This challenge can take two differ-ent forms, at odds with one another in important respects. It is sometimesargued that MacIntyre is too pessimistic about the chances of reachingagreement onmoral matters in contemporary culture. In fact, the argumentis sometimes made (in the spirit of Fukuyama 1992) that many of the ten-sions in human culture have been worked out (or soon will be) through thewidespread agreement on the truisms of liberal political culture and through


the mechanisms of a regulated and benign market. MacIntyre’s picture ofcontemporary culture as constituted by a fragmented moral vocabulary,a vanishingly thin emotivist self, and interminable and incommensurablemoral debates is seen on this view as simply Celtic pessimism. But otherswho disagree with MacIntyre’s description of the state of moral discoursein contemporary culture take quite a different tack. Instead of criticizinghis view for being too pessimistic, they claim that in an important respectit is too optimistic. They argue that MacIntyre goes wrong in suggestingthat interminable moral disputes are a distinctive feature of late modernity,because, these critics claim, such disputes are found in many periods in thedevelopment of human culture when the particular features of breakdownand fragmentationMacIntyre finds in modernity do not hold. The first ver-sion of this criticism then holds that moral disagreement and fragmentationare not as widespread asMacIntyre claims; the second version admits that itmay be as widespread in contemporary culture, but claims that interminablemoral disputes have always been with us. MacIntyre can take some comfortat least that while those views are not strictly incompatible it is unlikely thatboth versions of this criticism will hit home.It must be admitted that MacIntyre’s claims about the character of con-

temporary culture and the state of contemporarymoral discourse, especiallyas they are laid out with such sweep and with such a distinctive rhetoricalnote in the opening chapters ofAfter Virtue, surely outrun the evidence thathe presents for these claims. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what kind ofevidence would be sufficient for claims of such breadth. MacIntyre drawson a broad range of social theorists, artists, and philosophers in developingthis description. Durkheim, Henry James, Goffman,Weber,WilliamGass,Sartre, and Kierkegaard, among others, put in appearances as witnesses forMacIntyre’s view of “emotivist culture.” The ambitions of his descriptionhere, of course, go far beyond thoseofmost contemporaryEnglish-speakingphilosophers. He trespasses in various ways on territory that in the neatlycompartmentalized contemporary academy has been given over to disci-plines other than philosophy. What can be said in defense of MacIntyre’sview here, however, is considerable. First, the description he gives ringstrue at least in broad outline to many readers. Other philosophers suchas Bernard Williams (1985) and Charles Taylor (1989), who disagree withmany other features of MacIntyre’s view, are in broad agreement with hisclaims here. Second, by placing these views on the table and depicting themin such stark terms,MacIntyre has inspired a continuing interest on the partof social theorists (for example, Bellah 1985) in confirming or disconfirmingthem.

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But more importantly, MacIntyre has convinced many moral philoso-phers that, whatever the final scholarly verdict on his particular descriptionof contemporary social structure and its ills may be, the attempt to examinecarefully the social structure within which a moral philosophy will beembodied is an important part of the overall task of normative theory.However inadequate MacIntyre’s particular description of contemporaryculture may seem to some readers (and recall that to many of us it does notseem so inadequate), it is surely important that he at least attempts to cometo terms with the character of contemporary social life. MacIntyre is rightthat “every moral philosophy presupposes a sociology,” but if he is rightabout that, then it is a condition of adequacy for any moral philosophythat it attend to the sociology it presupposes – and also to the sociologypresupposed by views it is opposing. This is a lesson that MacIntyrehas taught all of us. It has the unfortunate consequence, of course, thatphilosophers must get their hands dirty in sometimes messy issues of socialdescription,17 but perhaps that is part of the price of developing normativetheories of genuine relevance to the lives and decisions of those who holdthem. MacIntyre’s willingness to engage issues about the detailed socialembodiment of normative theories contrasts sharply with the practice of themain proponents of neo-Kantian and consequentialist normative theories.They are content for the most part to abstract from any real engagementwith detailed descriptions of contemporary social life in developing theirtheories. Trolley cases could as well be chariot cases if discussed by Socratesor rickshaw cases if discussed by nineteenth-century Confucians.18 Modelsof idealized economic rationality or of idealized contexts of discussions inwhich discussants abstract from their “real” social positions may be usefulin dealing with certain issues in moral philosophy, but only if care is takento relate them by appropriate bridge principles to real conditions of thesocial life of those whose actions are to be guided by the normative theoriesunder discussion. Surely one of the most important reasons for the revivalof virtue theory in recent ethics is the perception (whether justified in allcases or not) that concentration on the virtues will force moral philoso-phers to confront the conditions of moral choice less abstractly than isfrequently done.Those critics ofMacIntyre who challenge his chillingly pessimistic view

of the culture of late modernity may be right then that he draws conclusionsnot fully warranted by the evidence he brings forward. But surely he is to becommended for attempting to discharge his responsibility, as he sees it, todiscuss the disputes among contemporary normative theories in a sociallyrealisticmanner.Many ofMacIntyre’s philosophical opponents who are lessconcerned with engaging the culture purchase a certain theoretical tidiness


and clarity for their views, but one suspects at the cost of irrelevance to thelives of those whose choices they hoped to influence.The second broad response to MacIntyre’s project in normative ethics

calls into question his claim to be producing a normative ethical theory at all.We are reminded by these critics that he rejects the Enlightenment Projectand its attempt to construct normative theories around rational principlesaccessible to all fully rational creatures. He also rejects (at least in AfterVirtue) any help he might get from a classical teleological metaphysicalview in anchoring a justificatory normative theory. Moreover, he confessesto being a member of a culture whose moral concepts and ideas are largelyfragments of dying or deadmoral conceptions and that is emotivist in its useof moral language. Finally, as we saw at the end of the last section, when hedoes get around to producing an account of how one ethical theory mightprove itself rationally superior to another, the account presupposes a view oftradition-constituted inquiry that is both historically and socially situatedand that will almost certainly make use of concepts and principles thatare incommensurable with those of competing traditions. In spite of this,MacIntyre continues to claim to be amoral realist whose central theoreticalambition in ethics is to achieve the truth (not just warranted assertibility)about ethics and to provide rational support for the claim that what isachieved is the truth (see MacIntyre 1994b and 1999b).Given this puzzling combination of views it has seemed to some critics

that MacIntyre would be better classified with anti-theorists like BernardWilliams. Others have thought that in spite of his protests to the contraryMacIntyre must finally be committed to some relativistic or perspectivistview in normative ethics. MacIntyre’s objections to relativism and perspec-tivism are so strong, and have been so often repeated, however, that one canhardly suspect him of seriously holding these views, even unintentionally.The relation of his views to the sophisticated views of anti-theorists likeWilliams is, however, more complicated.WhileMacIntyre does not regard himself as an anti-theorist, he accepts

a great deal of the anti-theorist project. He wants in a way to accept theirpremises and reject their conclusion.19 He accepts “the thesis that moralpractice can only be understood fromwithin and their corresponding denialthat viable moral theory can find a basis for its enquiries or its conclusionsindependent of and external to moral practice” (MacIntyre 1994d).20 Whathe rejects is “the thesis that therefore all moral theory is an illegitimateenterprise, one condemned to distortion and illusion” (MacIntyre 1994d).MacIntyre thinks he can hold these two views together by developing anethical theory that is dependent on the local and the particular in its startingpoint, but worthy of being called a theory in its aspiration. He wants ethical

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theory to grow out of the ethical activity of communities but to aspire tomake universal claims that reject any putative provenance from an imper-sonal or value-neutral perspective. Theory will be rooted in particular prac-tices and the insights available only from within them, but will make claimsthat can conflict (and be seen to conflict) with those of alien communities.How does he flesh out this view?MacIntyre argues that ethical theory can emerge in three stages from the

ethical life of a well-ordered community. At the first stage, members of thecommunity will need to evaluate their actions and those of others, and suchevaluation may in particular cases call for a kind of justification. The needfor justificationwill typically not arise from a general theoretical interest butrather from a particular question about a problem in action. At the secondstage,MacIntyre claims that such attempts to settle questions of justificationwill presuppose shared standards in the community. Indeed, the intelligi-bility of the questions arising at the first stage presupposes such standards,and these standards will be formulated at the second stage. But there mightbe circumstances in which the nature of disagreement within a communityis so deep that justifications for these standards themselves would be calledinto question. At this third stage, ethical arguments would be developed todefend alternative possible standards. In all such inquiries and at whateverdegree of distance from particular problems, however, reflection beginswith specific problems in the community, and MacIntyre claims that therewill be particular goods and virtues connected to the project of inquiry itself.Thus, on his view, ethical theory will grow out of the normal ethical activityof communities of self-aware and reflective creatures. It will be integratedinto these communities and impossible without the rootedness that comeswith this kind of reflection. “The context within which theoretical moralenquiry alone has point and purpose is then that provided by the activitiesof some particular community” (MacIntyre 1994d).What price does one pay in attempting to do ethical theory outside the

context of a particular community? MacIntyre argues that, among otherdifficulties, one can have no sense of the terminus of moral debate. Whatbrings moral reflection in a community on a particular matter to a closeis the resolution of the particular dispute that gave rise to it. If theoreticalinquiry is not rooted in the particularities of concrete disputes, then dis-agreement may be interminable. MacIntyre thinks that the anti-theoristsare particularly good at recognizing the necessity for this kind of rootedness:

In situations in which not enough is shared, theoretical argument and en-quiry necessarily become practically barren. The kind of theorizingwhich is


symptomatic of and generated by this condition of break-down are familiar:the setting by theorists to themselves of impossible Quixotic tasks, such asthat of how to provide grounds for rationally well-grounded moral agree-ment and trust among individuals in Prisoner’s Dilemma type situations;the genesis of interminable disagreements about the terminus of justifica-tory arguments; and most of all a failure to remember that especially intimes of crisis theorists, like everyone else, are sustained by the continuinginarticulate, atheoretical goodness of those whose unexamined lives are wellworth living. About this once again the reminders of antitheorists are oftensalutary. (MacIntyre 1994d)

At this point in his argument, however, MacIntyre’s critics may say thathe has given in to the anti-theorists altogether.What is left of the aspirationof theory for universal and objectively grounded norms on such a partic-ularistic view? MacIntyre is clear that there need be no conflict betweenregarding moral norms as ultimately rooted in the particularity of commu-nity life and regarding them as aspiring to universality and genuine truth.The fact that communities typically – and perhaps necessarily – seek tocombat the opposing ethical claims of distant communities suggests thatthey see no inconsistency. MacIntyre recognizes that, given his picture ofthe genesis of ethical theory from community life, these conflicts are go-ing to be rationally problematic. In Whose Justice?, as we have noted, hegives an elaborate account of how rational debate among competing com-munities about the moral rules that govern them can be carried on withoutany appeal to perspectives or points of view abstracted from the concretelife of the competing communities. He also gives a good deal of practicaladvice about how we should conduct the details of such arguments betweenculturally distant communities. He thinks it is particularly important thatwe strive to avoid the use of power and manipulation in settling such dis-putes, availing ourselves of rational inquiry alone. He also suggests that westrive to separate disputes that are, at least for the present, intractable fromthose that give some promise of being resolvable – and that we should focusour discussions and arguments on the latter. And he suggests that we shouldbe particularly attentive to our own failures in giving a convincing defenseof our norms to others and seek rational means to make our argumentsmore persuasive to our interlocutors.While giving such advice, however, and while developing his elaborate

account of tradition-based inquiry, MacIntyre stops short of promising analgorithmic device that will guarantee, even ideally, a resolution of all prac-tical conflicts across communities. But if this is what is required of moral

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reflection in order for it to count as genuinely theoretical, then surely hardlyanyone is a theorist. MacIntyre doesn’t guarantee the resolution of all con-flicts, but then in this respect he is no worse off than other contemporarymoral theorists.21 Nobody is handing out guarantees.22

In the end it seems to me that debates about whether MacIntyre is do-ing normative theory or rejecting it are not very important. What is clearis that MacIntyre claims that a certain view of ethics is true, and he bringsarguments in support of that view’s truth. In his most recent book, Depen-dent Rational Animals, he has developed a set of concrete normative viewsin much more detail than in any of his previous ethical writings. His de-fense, in that book, of the importance of human weakness and vulnerabilityand the claims these features of human life make on us is developed witha clarity of conception and passion that will convince any reader of thebook that MacIntyre thinks these views are true. For those who find hisviews on ethics expressed there or elsewhere implausible, their only resortis to bring arguments against those views, and then the dialogue can begin.MacIntyre’s past philosophical behavior suggests that he will not hesitate tobecome involved in that dialogue. Indeed, his own willingness throughouthis career to reformulate his views in order to make them more compellingas well as his relentless dialectical engagement with those who disagree withhim are perhaps the most significant indications of his commitment to thepossibility of genuine truth in ethics. There are large questions, of course,about whether he can in the end vindicate his account of tradition-basedrationality, and those questions must be left aside here. There should beno doubt, however, about his commitment to the classical project of ethicaltheory. He makes it clear that one can criticize Enlightenment concep-tions of ethical theory without abandoning the project of ethical theoryaltogether.

4. CONCLUSION

There seems little doubt that MacIntyre’s contributions to contemporarymoral philosophy will continue to be both influential and deeply contro-versial. His views are influential, I suspect, because they embody a critiqueof contemporary culture that is much more concrete than that providedby the more abstract and formal ethical theories advanced by such Kantianrationalists as Rawls and such consequentialists as Parfit. It is also a critiquethat rings true tomany of those who feel uneasy about central features of lifein late modernity – but who want to resist the excesses of postmodernism.


It is more difficult, I think, to understand why his views continue to be socontroversial. At a time when most academic moral philosophers combinea deeply secular view of the world with a commitment to some form ofliberal political theory, MacIntyre’s orthodox Catholicism and his sharp at-tacks on liberalism may seem explanation enough. I suspect, however, thatthe reasons run deeper than this and have as much to do with his styleof philosophy as with the content of his philosophical beliefs. As we haveseen, he has raised far-reaching objections to the received methodologiesof both metaethics and normative ethics, and has modeled in his work analternative to these methodologies. In this respect, he is a genuine radicaland stands outside the mainstream of contemporary moral philosophy. Theattention paid recently by moral philosophers to the history of their subjectsuggests, however, that many of MacIntyre’s ideas may now be enteringthe mainstream. What the consequences of this may be for the practice ofacademic moral philosophy and its role in the culture remains to be seen.

Notes

1. Most notable is J. B. Schneewind, whose The Invention of Autonomy (1998) bril-liantly (if not always successfully) seeks to overturn MacIntyre’s account of thehistory of modern moral philosophy from Suarez to Kant.

2. Since other papers in this volume are focusing on MacIntyre’s specific engage-mentswith the history of ethics, I will, to the extent possible, focus onMacIntyre’sengagement with contemporary ethical theory. Given the nature of his view,however, it will not always be possible to keep these two contexts of thoughtseparate.

3. This has been suggested most notoriously by A. J. Ayer in the famous fifthchapter of Language, Truth and Logic (1936).

4. Stevenson’s most important work both expositing and defending noncognitivismis Ethics and Language (1944), while Ayer sends his cannon shot across the bowof cognitivist theories first in Language, Truth and Logic (1936).

5. This thesis has not been published. I would like to thank Professor MacIntyrefor making a copy available for me to examine.

6. It is particularly penetrating in criticizing intuitionism, of whichMacIntyre says,“but all intuitionist writers suffer from one difficulty: they are, on their own view,telling us only about what we all know already. That they sometimes disagreeabout what it is that we all know already only makes them less boring at the costof making them even less convincing” (Short History, p. 254).

7. It is important not to confuse MacIntyre’s indictment with that of the radical.He says of the difference:For themodern radical is as confident in themoral expression of his stancesand consequently in the assertive uses of the rhetoric of morality as any

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conservative has ever been. Whatever else he denounces in our culture heis certain that it still possesses the moral resources which he requires inorder to denounce it. Everything else may be, in his eyes, in disorder; butthe language of morality is in order, just as it is. (After Virtue, 4)

8. It is significant, I think, that MacIntyre begins this book with a focus on moraldisagreement and, in this, follows closely the structure of the most significantwork in emotivism, Charles Stevenson’s Ethics and Language. After this begin-ning, of course, there is significant divergence in their views.

9. This is yet a further development of MacIntyre’s metaethical views explored inthe previous section.

10. The notion of a “character” is one of themost difficult inMacIntyre’s repertoireof tools of social description. He says of it:A character is an object of regard by the members of the culture generallyor by some significant segment of it. It furnishes them with a culturaland moral ideal. Hence the demand is that in this type of case role andpersonality be fused. Social type and psychological type are required tocoincide. The character morally legitimates a mode of social existence.(After Virtue, p. 29)

11. A much fuller account of MacIntyre’s notion of a tradition is given in Chapter 2of this volume.

12. Even to pose this question, of course, is to take sides in the debate, since theclash between Aristotle and Nietzsche is, in part, a clash about whether rationalvindication is possible or even coherent.

13. The fact that some philosophers still attempt to do this simply testifies to howirresponsible philosophers can be.

14. Indeed, some of us who teach MacIntyre have been chastised by him for at-tempting to make his views more palatable than, according to him, they shouldbe. In fact, he clearly believes that his views can only be made palatable to con-temporary philosophers at the cost of making them boring. If they are to beinteresting, they must be, he thinks, radical and in some sense unattractive.

15. Indeed, his treatment of Kierkegaard alone is the subject of the recent bookof essays Kierkegaard After MacIntyre (Davenport and Rudd 2001). There alsohas been much critical discussion of his treatment of Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume,Kant, and Nietzsche, as well as of his interpretation of the Enlightenment.

16. I will also not comment at length on the many ad hominem remarks that heseems to attract. Moral philosophers as able as Thomas Nagel could surely dobetter than to snipe at MacIntyre’s religious views, as Nagel does when he saysin a review ofWhose Justice? that “my sense is thatMacIntyre’s religion is drivinghis philosophy.He wants to produce an argument that does not rely on religiouspremises to show that only something like a religious morality is possible. Thiscannot be done. But to him, the conclusion of the argument is evident on othergrounds” (Nagel 1995b, p. 209). I am not sure whatNagelmeans by “somethinglike a religiousmorality” and I suspect he doesn’t either.My sense is thatNagel’ssecularism and dislike of religion is driving his philosophy here.

17. But it is not always unpleasant. Many moral philosophers were first attractedto MacIntyre’s view of moral philosophy, I suspect, because it allowed them


to spend their summers reading Trollope’s novels while convincing themselvesand their paymasters that they were just doing their job researching the mid-Victorian ‘ought’.

18. A prominent moral philosopher recently mentioned that she forbade the men-tion of trolley cases in her classes – surely a policy MacIntyre would look uponfavorably.

19. I am not, of course, suggesting that MacIntyre is rejecting the pressure of avalid argument, but rather that he regards the conclusions of the anti-theorists’arguments as not validly following from their premises.

20. In what follows, I am guided by MacIntyre’s unpublished paper, “Moral The-ory Put to the Question,” presented at an American Philosophical Associationsymposium on anti-theory in ethics at which he appeared with Tim Scanlonand Allan Gibbard.

21. Some moral philosophers do come close to giving a guarantee. Derek Parfitseems to think that when the last residue of religious belief is wrung out ofmodern men and women, his austere consequentialism will carry all before it.As he says on the last page of Reasons and Persons:Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the free development of moralreasoning. Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recentevent, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-ReligiousEthics is at a very early stage. We cannot predict whether, as in Mathe-matics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics willdevelop, it is not irrational to have high hopes. (Parfit 1984, p. 454).

Thomas Nagel seems to think that we have reason to hope that our primitivemoral consciousness may someday find its Newton and with it a theoreticalstructure that will heal all wounds. His optimism is well expressed in a passagetoward the end of The View From Nowhere:In ethics, even without the benefit of many clear examples, we should beopen to the possibility of progress as we are in other areas, with a con-sequent effect of reduced confidence in the finality of our current under-standing. It is evident thatwe are at a primitive stage ofmoral development.Even the most civilized human beings have only a haphazard understand-ing of how to live, how to treat others, how to organize their societies. Theidea that the basic principles of morality are known, and that the problemsall come in their interpretation and application, is one of the most fantas-tic conceits to which our conceited species has been drawn. (Nagel 1986,p. 186)

22. MacIntyre’s optimism about the possibility of moral agreement across com-munities may be one point at which his religious views do influence his moralphilosophy. Mindful of the Christian injunction to avoid despair and the cen-trality of the virtue of hope in the Christian life, he surely has resources forexpecting things to work out that are denied more secular thinkers. In thisrespect, it is easier for Christians to “work without a net.”

6 MacIntyre’s Political PhilosophyM A R K C . M U R P H Y

In this chapter I will take up questions concerning MacIntyre’s polit-ical thought as that thought has developed from After Virtue onward.MacIntyre’s political thought is best understood in terms of its opposi-tion to, and as an attempt to describe an alternative to, the political formthat dominates modern life: the state. On MacIntyre’s view, the modernstate is trapped in a dilemma: it is unable to justify itself without bearinga substantive conception of the good, but the state is entirely unfit to beara substantive conception of the good. State politics is indefensible, inco-herent in theory and practice (section 1). A set of political institutions, tobe rationally justifiable, will have to be able to sustain politics conceived asa practice and will have to be carried out locally within the enabling con-straints set by the natural law (section 2). But there are serious questions tobe raised concerning both MacIntyre’s criticism of state politics and his en-dorsement of a politics of local community: it is unclear whether the stateis as deeply flawed an institution as MacIntyre suggests and it is unclearwhether the politics of local community, as MacIntyre describes it, is notitself deeply incoherent (section 3).

1. MacINTYRE’S CRITIQUE OF THE MODERN STATE

Just as MacIntyre takes the central task of moral philosophy to be thatof accounting for the rational authority of morals (After Virtue, p. 52) –the failure of the Enlightenment project is just the failure to exhibit thatauthority –MacIntyre takes the central task of political philosophy to be thatof accounting for the authority of political institutions. Political philosophyis centrally concerned with political justifications, which are

those arguments advanced to show why we, as members of some particularpolitical society, should or should not accept as having legitimate authorityover us the commands utteredby someone claiming executive authority over

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or in that society or the laws uttered by someone or some body claiminglegislative authority over or in that society (MacIntyre 1997b, p. 241).

Political institutions are law-giving and law-enforcing, and claim to haveauthority to give and enforce those laws. But it is a remarkable fact aboutcontemporary political philosophy that a number of writers have, whileagreeing that the central issue in political philosophy is that of politicalauthority, denied that any satisfactory account of such authority can beprovided (see, especially, Simmons 1979 and Raz 1979), and that a num-ber of writers have, contrary to centuries of traditional political philosophy,turned their attention away from thequestionof political authority (whetherand why political institutions have the power to give binding commands)and toward the question of political legitimacy (whether and why politicalinstitutions have the right to coerce citizens within their domains) (see, es-pecially,Waldron 1987 and Rawls 1993, pp. 136–137). InMacIntyre’s view,the failure of contemporary philosophy to provide successful solutions tothe problem of political authority, and the turning of philosophical atten-tion from political authority to legitimate use of coercion, is best explainedin light of the fact that political philosophers have framed their inquiriesin terms of the modern state. Again, just as MacIntyre takes the problemsof moral philosophy to be, within the constraints set by the Enlightenmentproject, insoluble (After Virtue, pp. 51–61), he takes the problems of po-litical authority to be, within the constraints set by the institution of themodern state, insoluble.Why is the political justification of the state doomed to failure? Let

us begin with a brief characterization of what exactly MacIntyre means by‘the state.’ He does not mean “whatever political organization happens tobe dominant in a particular society.” He means a particular kind of politicalorganization. States exhibit territorial governance. Their organization iscentralized and hierarchical, and their rule over their citizens is direct andpervasive. They expect the allegiance of their citizens; indeed, they expectthat allegiance to “have precedence over that formerly owed to family, clan,commune, lord, bishop, pope, or emperor” (Morris 1998, p. 45; I draw onMorris’s excellent book for the salient characteristics of modern states). Asis clear, the state is the form of political organization that dominates mod-ern life: the whole political world exists as a state system. Every politicalphilosopher, and every reader of political philosophy, carries out his or herinquiries while living under a state. Given that the state is a ubiquitous fea-ture of modern political life, it is not hard to see why political philosopherswould frame their inquiries in terms of it. But, as MacIntyre notes, the

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unwillingness to consider questions of political forms alternative to thosethat are prevailing “is always ideological in its effect” (MacIntyre 1996a,p. 62): it is to treat the present dominant forms of political life as inevitable;and to think of any form of political life as inevitable is to mask its defects,defects that can be brought out by considering what alternatives to the statecould be, or might have been, realized.MacIntyre’s most thoroughly developed line of criticism of the modern

state is against what we may call the “neutralist” state. A state is neutralist ifit decides how to act in terms of, and bases its claims for citizens’ allegianceupon, only those extremely thin conceptions of the good that are shared byall minimally rational members of that political society. MacIntyre holdsthat the political justifications of neutralist states inevitably fail, and thussuch states receive the allegiance of their citizens only through errors onthe part of those citizens. Neutralist states can expect the support of theircitizens only if those citizens remain deceived.The neutralist state, which appeals to only a thin conception of the

human good, can justify allegiance to itself only by an appeal to the publicinterest – to the provision of a secure order in which individuals may pursuetheir own ends (MacIntyre 1997b, p. 241). In order to provide a successfulaccount of the state’s authority, the state must appeal only to those goodsthat are useful to all citizens in pursuit of their own ends, ends justifiedonly in terms of each individuals’ idiosyncratic conception of the good.A citizen should have allegiance to the state because it is the state thatprovides goods that are essential or extremely important with respect to thepursuit of that citizen’s own conception of the good. But MacIntyre thinksthat any account of political allegiance that appeals only to such goods isbound to fail. For one has sufficient reason to promote the public interestthrough one’s allegiance to the state and obedience to its dictates only ifthis allegiance and obedience help one to promote one’s individual goodmore successfully thanwould one’s lack of allegiance and disobedience.Thisgenerates two problems for public-interest accounts of the state’s authority(MacIntyre 1984e, pp. 225–226; see alsoWhose Justice?, p. 347; MacIntyre1997b, p. 242).The first problem is that of freeriders. One’s own contribution to the

public interest by obedience to the state is, in most cases, rather minimal;the vast majority of the work done in promoting the public interest is,obviously, done by others. Abstracting for a moment from the risks to one’sindividual good that are due to state punishment as a result of disobedience,it will be quite often true that one will do better from the point of view ofone’s individual good by withholding one’s contribution to the enterprise


of promoting the public interest rather than by contributing. And even ifstate punishment is figured in, the difficulty is not resolved, for the stateis constructed to deal only with minor or sporadic major violations of itsdictates; it is built for compliance, not noncompliance.The second problem is that of dangerous jobs. No political society can

survive without the existence of persons willing to do dangerous jobs – jobswhose performance is essential to thewell-being of that political society, butwhich pose grave risks to those parties that carry them out. Police, soldiers,firefighters – even, in some areas, public high school teachers – performjobs that are difficult to justify in terms of their contribution simply to one’sindividual good. So if the state’s appeal for allegiance is simply what thestate can do with respect to each citizen’s individual good, it seems as ifthe state has not explained why there should be anyone willing to do thedangerous jobs essential to a state’s success.The upshot of these arguments is that if we take the public-interest ac-

count to be the story of why citizens should have allegiance to the state, thenthe state can survive only by having citizens that are deceived (MacIntyre1997b, p. 242). Given the transparent inability of the public-interest ar-gument to provide an adequate account of allegiance to the state, theexplanation of the state’s persistence will be a story of citizens’ errors.That the state is dependent on the existence of a largely confused citi-zenry provides at least part of the explanation for the state’s peculiar hybridethos:

The modern nation-state . . . present[s] itself on the one hand as a bu-reaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about, but neveractually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a reposi-tory for sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’slife on its behalf. . . . It is like being asked to die for the telephone company.(MacIntyre 1994f, p. 303)

Now, I take it that most defenders of the neutralist state would agreewith the essentials, if not with the details, of MacIntyre’s criticism of anyargument for allegiance that takes as its premisemerely the prospect of thosebenefits with respect to one’s own good that can be realized instrumentallythrough the state. But defenders of the neutralist state are likely here toappeal to principles of justice in accounting for allegiance to the state,principles whose binding force is independent of any particular conceptionof the good and thus can be invoked against parties with various visions ofthe good life to explain why they should be reluctant to freeride and whythey should do their share with respect to the performance of dangerous

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jobs within their states (see, for example, Hart 1955; Rawls 1964; Klosko1992).It may seem surprising that MacIntyre gives the criticism of the public-

interest account pride of place in his attack on the neutralist state, sincemost philosophers defending the neutralist state would appeal to justicerather than private benefit alone in making their case (see, for example,Rawls 1971, pp. 350–355; Waldron 1993), and since the self-image of thestate – if we take the writings in judicial opinions to be representative ofthat self-image – is often that of an institution that requires allegiance outof the demands of justice.1 I take it that the reason that MacIntyre givesthe public-interest argument pride of place, given his own views on thepriority of the good to the right (MacIntyre 1990d, p. 345), is that thepublic-interest argument, weak as it is, is at least an argument that makesthe necessary appeal to the good. The public-interest argument fails byrelying on a conception of the good too thin to do the job that the stateneeds it to do. But it is at least the right sort of an argument – an argumentthat begins from the goods made possible by political institutions.Why are appeals to justice as accounts of political allegiance the wrong

sorts of arguments, on MacIntyre’s view? The most fundamental reason isgrounded in the After Virtue argument against the Enlightenment project.ThereMacIntyre argues that the task of providing an account ofmoral rulesjustifiable to rational beings in the absence of an account of the appropriatetelos of human life is doomed to fail. I will not rehearse here that argument,which is discussed in Chapter 4, except to note that it applies as well toargument about rules that will structure not only the lives of particularpeople but the lives of whole communities: without some conception ofthe good of that community, of the form of life that is the proper endfor common life, rules of justice that are rationally justifiable are not tobe had.The difficulty is not that, in the neutralist state, we can come up with no

plausible candidate principles of justice. The difficulty is that we can comeup with all too many, the results of different justificatory procedures, with-out any way of rationally deciding among them (MacIntyre 1990d, p. 348).And since these principles of justice and these procedures of deciding onprinciples of justice make claims to ultimacy, we seem to be stuck withoutany way of coming to decide rationally on such principles. (See, for an il-lustration of this point, MacIntyre’s discussion of the Rawls/Nozick debatein After Virtue, pp. 244–255.) As MacIntyre notes, incommensurability be-tween rival justificatory schemes need not mean that one of the competitorscannot emerge victorious. But we have not seen anything like progress in


the debate among the various competitors – Kantianisms, utilitarianisms,intuitionisms, contractarianisms (Whose Justice?, p. 344).Now, one might respond: perhaps all of this is too hasty. Perhaps

MacIntyre iswrong to think that theEnlightenment project is fatally flawed:we have to allow, as MacIntyre does allow, that radical conceptual innova-tion is always possible, so that what is not foreseeable to us here and nowmight come as the result of radical invention (Whose Justice?, p. 346; AfterVirtue, pp. 93–95). And so even if we were to concede that it is not clearhow it is even possible for rules of justice to be defended without an appealto a substantive theory of the good, and that rival accounts of such rulesare at present simply at odds with each other with no direction of progressapparent, the possibility that progress will emerge is a live one. But theallowance of the bare possibility that the rational agreement on principlesof justice will emerge that provide us with justification for allegiance tothe neutralist state surely does nothing to provide those living under suchstates, here and now, with a political justification of them (Whose Justice?,p. 346).MacIntyre has two other relevant arguments against the appeal to neu-

tralist justice to deal with the problem of political justification. The first isthat further debates about appropriate principles of justice are not, withinthe constraints set by the neutralist state, going to be of institutional im-portance. The work of political philosophers in articulating conceptions ofjustice and arguing through them has negligible impact on the process ofpolitical decision making. We have in the modern state, MacIntyre argues,a collection of small academic circles in which inquiry takes place, and apolitical world in which inquiry is excluded. (It is hard to see how inquirycould play any key role in politics, given the subservience to corporationsthat the modern state exhibits: because the modern state is so dependenton such corporations for the revenues to fund its activities, there is littlepossibility of political inquiry that could effectively limit such corporations;seeMacIntyre 1999d, pp. 139–140.) There are at least two important impli-cations of this divide between rational inquiry and political processes in thestate. The first is that even some success in rational inquiry into principlesof justice would be of little use to someone asking about allegiance to thestate, for there is little reason to think that rationally justified principles ofjustice would, qua rationally justified, ever become realized in practice. Thesecond is that the state, through this very division, makes itself less wor-thy of allegiance. For it lacks the institutional settings for common inquirythat would enable the vast majority of those living under it to recognize itsshortcomings. There is thus prima facie reason for suspicion of the state,

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that is, that it lacks the resources to bring its deficiencies to light so thatthey can be, so far as possible, corrected (MacIntyre 1997b, p. 239).There is a second worry about the possibility of solving the problem of

political allegiance to the modern state by an appeal to neutralist principlesof justice, one to which MacIntyre calls attention in his Lindley Lectureon the virtue of patriotism. In that lecture MacIntyre considers two rivalviews on patriotism – that of the antipatriotic liberal, and that of the an-tiliberal patriot. The lecture’s question, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?,” is neveranswered; rather, he notes deep difficulties for both positions.We will con-sider MacIntyre’s criticism of the patriot’s response in the next section. Buthere we should note the relevance of his criticism of the liberal antipatriot’sposition. He understands the liberal to appeal to principles of morality thatare justifiable from an impartial point of view, and those liberals that want todefend the neutralist state characteristically include as part of the impartialpoint of view the notion that the rules of justice are justified without appealto one’s own particular conception of the good (see Rawls 1971, p. 137;Dworkin 1978). Now, MacIntyre supposes that adherence to this sort ofposition will raise trouble for an argument for allegiance to some particularstate. The rules of justice as articulated in this impartial framework are sup-posed to apply to all and to concern the treatment of all. But it is hard to seehow we can pull out of justice thus understood a requirement of allegianceto some particular state. This difficulty has been emphasized by other theo-rists in the liberal tradition: John Simmons has referred to the “particularityrequirement” that all accounts of political obligation must satisfy, and hasargued persuasively that appeals to liberal conceptions of justice do not en-able the theorist of political authority to satisfy this desideratum (Simmons1979, pp. 30–35; see also Green 1990, pp. 232–234; for MacIntyre’s clearendorsement of the particularity requirement, see MacIntyre 1983e).But justice can be realized only in particular settings, under particular

institutions. So the appeal to a neutralist conception of justice to justifyallegiance to the state brings with it the same danger that we noted abovewith respect to a public-interest justificationof the state.Thepublic-interestargument fails, and so if the citizens see clearly the failure of that argument,the state’s capacity to promote the public interest will be undercut. Theargument from liberal justice must fail, and so if citizens see clearly thefailure of that argument, the state’s capacity to realize a conception of justiceis undercut.The neutralist state must appeal either to a conception of the good

that is thin enough to be neutral among citizens with different substantiveconceptions of the good or to a conception of justice that is defensible apart


from an appeal to a substantive conception of the good. But in MacIntyre’sview, neither of these justifications for allegiance to a neutralist state cansucceed. Why is this not, then, an argument for a nonneutralist state, astate that is the bearer of a thick, substantive conception of the good?This is, after all, the conception of state politics that goes by the label‘communitarianism’ (see Sandel 1980), a doctrine with which MacIntyre isoften associated. But MacIntyre rejects communitarianism, insofar as it isunderstood as a recommendation for the politics of the modern state.

Contemporary communitarians, from whom I have strongly disassociatedmyself whenever I have had an opportunity to do so, advance their propos-als as a contribution to the politics of the nation-state. Where liberals havecharacteristically insisted that government within a nation-state should re-main neutral between rival conceptions of the human good, contemporarycommunitarians have urged that such government should give expressionto some shared vision of the human good, a vision defining some type ofcommunity. Where liberals have characteristically urged that it is in the ac-tivities of subordinate voluntary associations, such as those constituted byreligious groups, that shared visions of the good should be articulated, com-munitarians have insisted that the nation itself through the institutions ofthe nation-state ought to be constituted to some degree as a community. . . .[F]rommy own point of view communitarians have attacked liberals on oneissue onwhich liberals have been consistently in the right. (MacIntyre 1994f,p. 302; see also MacIntyre 1991b)

Themodern state as an all-embracing community is rightly resistedby liber-als, “understandinghow it generates totalitarian andother evils” (MacIntyre1994f, p. 303).Why exactly doesMacIntyre take the modern state’s bearingof a conception of the good to be totalitarian? What is objectionable aboutthe state taking an official position on such matters?I take it that the imposition of such a conception of the good is intolera-

ble, onMacIntyre’s view, both because the state’s decisionmaking processesare isolated from procedures of rational inquiry into the good and becausethat decisionmaking proceeds hierarchically. The result of these featuresin tandem is that a conception of the good would be imposed from abovewithout adequate rational inquiry into the defensibility of that conceptionof the good and without adequate participation in decisionmaking by thosewhose lives will be governed by that conception. This is objectionable fromMacIntyre’s point of view because of his endorsement of the Aristotelianview that the human good is realized in large part through practical reason-ing, and that practical reasoning is not simply a means to achieving one’s

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good but a major constituent of that good. Indeed, MacIntyre goes so faras to identify oppression with deprivation of the capacities and opportuni-ties for rational inquiry (MacIntyre 1997b, p. 250). To have a way of lifeimposed on one by an elite – and, what’s more, the sort of elite that tendsto end up in decisionmaking capacities within states, elites of status andwealth – is to have opportunities to achieve one’s good through practicalinquiry frustrated by the exercise of pervasive state power, and thus to beoppressed.So MacIntyre agrees with the communitarians against the liberals that

the neutralist state must lack authority. And MacIntyre agrees with theliberals against the communitarians that a non-neutralist state is, in theend, intolerable. This does not imply that we should reject the possibilityof political forms capable of calling for our rational allegiance; all that itimplies is “that the modern state is not such a form of government” (AfterVirtue, p. 255).What sort of political organization could admit of successfuljustification?

2. THE POLITICS OF LOCAL COMMUNITY

Recall that whileMacIntyre thinks that the argument from the public inter-est is grossly inadequate as an account of why citizens would owe allegianceto the neutralist state, he gives that argument pride of place in his criticismof the neutralist state because it is at least an argument of the right kind: onethat proceeds from the goods made possible by political life. The notion ofthe public interest available within the neutralist state is simply too thin tomake it rational for its members to give the state the allegiance that it callsfor. In providing a sketch of an alternative form of political life and politicalorganization, MacIntyre begins by considering what the goods of politicallife would have to be like in order to justify a set of political institutions.He then considers what the character of these goods tells us about howpolitics would have to be conceived, and what political institutions wouldhave to be like, in order to succeed where the politics of the modern statewas shown to fail.Any successful political justification, on MacIntyre’s view, will have to

proceed by taking the notion of the common good as its central normativeconcept. The notion of the common good as MacIntyre understands itdiffers fundamentally from the notion of the public interest as MacIntyreunderstands it. The public interest is defined in such a way as to be logicallyposterior to the goods of the members of the public: it is a set of conditions


that support individuals’ goods. We would have to be able to provide anaccount of the individual’s good that is independent of the notion of thepublic interest in order tomake sense of that idea. The normative claim thatthe public interest has on each practical reasoner derives entirely from theinstrumental relationship that holds between the realization of the publicinterest and the realization of his or her individual good. Even though thepublic interest is defined to be those conditions that are instrumentallyvaluable to the realization of a rational individual’s concept of the good, nomatter what the content of that concept, we can be sure that each individualwill have an interest in the provision of that good. But because adherence towhat the state calls upon an individual to do in pursuit of the public interestmay further that individual’s good less than the failure to adhere to the state’sdictate would, the normative pull of the public interest is not sufficientto support the state’s claim to allegiance. Because the individual’s good isdefined independently of the public interest, so that what one must do toachieve the public interest and what one must do to achieve one’s individualgood can pull massively apart, public interest political justifications aredoomed to failure.By contrast, the concept of a common good, as MacIntyre understands

it, is one that is not subordinate to a prior notion of an individual’s good.Rather, a good that is common to a number of persons is not merely instru-mental to the furtherance of their individual ends; it is constitutive of andpartially defining of those individuals’ goods. MacIntyre’s favorite exampleis that of a fishing crew (see, for example, MacIntyre 1994f, pp. 284–286;1997b, p. 240). The good of each of themembers of the fishing crew cannotbe characterized independently of the good common to all members of thecrew: that they work together properly at a high level of excellence in catch-ing fish. The good of a member of a fishing crew is partially characterizedin terms of whether the good of the whole crew is being realized, and sowhat it is for the fishing crew to be realizing a common good cannot itselfbe defined in terms of the goods of the individual members of that crew.The space in which common goods are possible is, in MacIntyre’s view,

the space of practices. (For a more complete discussion of practices thanthat which appears here, see Chapter 5 of this volume.) A practice is

any coherent and complex socially established cooperative human activ-ity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized inthe course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which areappropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with theresult that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions

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of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (After Virtue,p. 187)

That there be goods internal to that form of activity is essential to whethera form of activity constitutes a practice. Goods that are internal to a formof activity can be defined only in terms of that activity: they are not merelycontingently associated with a practice, but can be had only by participatingin that practice. By contrast, goods external to a form of activity can bedefined independently of that activity, are only contingently associated withit, and can be had other than by participating in that activity. So while thedevelopment of skills especial to fishing, and the exhibition of those skillsin common action through the excellent catching of fish, are goods internalto fishing, the financial rewards (not to mention the fish) that accrue tomembers of successful fishing crews are goods external to that practice.Now, while MacIntyre’s definition of internal and external goods em-

phasizes the necessary and contingent (respectively) connections to thepractices in which these goods can be realized, he suggests that anothersalient contrast concerns the way that internal goods tend to be commongoods and external goods private goods.

It is a characteristic of what I have called external goods that when achievedthey are always some individual’s property and possession. Moreover char-acteristically they are such that the more someone has of them, the lessthere is for other people. . . . External goods are therefore characteristicallyobjects of competition in which there must be losers as well as winners.Internal goods are indeed the outcome of competition to excel, but it ischaracteristic of them that their achievement is a good for the whole com-munity who participate in that practice. (After Virtue, pp. 190–191)

We can thus see why MacIntyre would take to be key to providing anaccount of the sort of politics that admits of justification that itwould includean appeal to a conception of politics as a practice, indeed as a practice thatis indispensable in each human life. For it is in the province of practicesthat common goods – goods that are constitutive of, and partially define,individual’s goods – can be realized. And it is only common goods that canprovide the normative support for successful political justifications.Does it make sense to conceive of politics as a practice? If ‘politics’ is

understood simply as large-scale jockeying for power or wealth, then itsconcern is with external goods only, and it cannot constitute a practice.But there is a not-unfamiliar human activity that naturally arises withinhuman communities that has the salient characteristics of a practice and that


MacIntyre takes to be properly political. Every human society is marked bythe presence of a multiplicity of practices, and individual human lives arecharacteristically marked by participation in a number of practices. Eachindividual inevitably faces questions about how the practices in one’s lifeare to be ordered. If I am a father and a member of a fishing crew, mygood is partially defined in terms of the goods of family life and partiallyin terms of the goods of fishing, and I will need to determine how bestto order those practices, and the goods internal to them, in my life. Butwe face similar questions within our communities about how the variouspractices within these communities are to be ordered. What places shouldsuch goods as fishing, family life, academic inquiry, aesthetic endeavor,and athletic achievement have in our common life? This is a question thatmembers of a community face in common, and must deliberate about incommon: the answers that one reaches on this question depend on theanswers reached by others (MacIntyre 1997b, p. 240).So consider the question that arises in communities of any complexity:

how are the practices, and the goods internal to these practices, to be or-dered in this community? This is a practical question: it is not for the sake ofspeculation but for action. There is a range of excellences that are necessaryfor answering this question well, and there is a range of capacities that aredeveloped through successive attempts to answer these questions in com-mon. An adequate explication of these excellences and developed capacities,and of the worthwhile activity engaged in by those attempting to answerthis question, cannot be offered except in terms of the activity itself. Thereare goods internal to the activity of attempting to answer questions abouthow the practices in a community’s life are to be ordered. This activity is,therefore, a practice. And it is this practice that MacIntyre understands thepractice of politics to be.Politics is, then, a second-order practice: its goods are those of delib-

eration about practices.2 It is, as MacIntyre understands it, an intenselycognitive activity. All practices are to some extent cognitive. Consider foot-ball, for example. Participation in a practice such as football involves notjust the playing of football – playingwhich includes a significant componentof intelligent thought and judgment – but also the assessment of one’s ownand others’ playing of the game, and the assessment of the standards bywhich playing is assessed. Politics is, however, cognitive in an even deeperway: its activity is practical reasoning, reasoning for the sake of action. Itsactivity is common practical reasoning about the common life.Politics is a practice that is indispensable to the achievement of one’s

individual good. The notion that some particular practice would be

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indispensable with respect to the achievement of one’s good has a strangering to it. If one were to say that participation in the practice of architec-ture, or badminton, were essential to the achievement of one’s good, thiswould seem strange indeed. But politics has a special place, on MacIntyre’sview. It has a special place because it is the practice best suited to the de-velopment of one’s rational powers, because of its role as a master practiceorganizing the various other practices (MacIntyre 1997b, p. 243). Engagingin politics involves deliberation about the whole range of goods availableto humans, and thus is the most demanding and enriching of the variouspractices.Suppose that MacIntyre is right about the goods internal to politics,

and the central place that those goods should have in a human life. Howdoes one proceed from these claims to the conclusion that there is some pos-sible set of political institutions whose authority we would be reasonable toaccept? While MacIntyre takes it to be a terrible mistake to confuse prac-tices with institutions, he also thinks that institutions are indispensable forpractices: “No practices can survive for any length of time unsustained byinstitutions” (After Virtue, p. 194). The institutions of governance that havea rightful claim to our obedience and allegiance are those that sustain andmake possible the practice of politics. From our understanding of the prac-tice of politics, sketchy as it is, we can see that such an institution wouldhave to be one that made possible effective common deliberation.By effective common deliberation I mean deliberation by everyone in

a political community, the outcome of which is a set of common actions.When it is going well, political deliberation, on MacIntyre’s view, includesall persons, for there is no one who has nothing to teach that is relevantfrom the point of view of how goods should be ordered within a politicalcommunity’s life. This is a point on which MacIntyre takes great painsto insist in his most recent work. Those whose temporary or permanentdisabilities prevent their personally taking part, MacIntyre argues, shouldnot be excluded from political deliberation. It is crucial that those who arethus disabled have proxies to speak for them, from their perspective. Onlyone who is a friend to such a person will be able to be his or her voice inpolitical inquiry, for only a friend can know someone sufficiently intimately(Dependent Rational Animals, p. 150).So one crucial matter is that governing institutions must preserve and

foster an arena of inquiry in which rational investigation into the goodcan be pursued, an arena from which no one is excluded. But governinginstitutions must also make the outcomes of these deliberations effective.Just as individual practical reasoning, when adequately carried out, issues


in individual action, political practical reasoning, when adequately carriedout, issues in political action. Governing institutions make effective the de-cisions reached in common deliberation by members of the political com-munity through the promulgation of directives, directives which call for theallegiance of the participants in the practice.Invariably the practice of politics, and the institutions sustaining that

practice, will have to be exemplified on a small scale. Politics, conceived andcarried out as a practice, is on MacIntyre’s view invariably a local matter.This view, MacIntyre emphasizes, is not based in some love of the local assuch. It is simply a brute truth that the conditions under which commondeliberation can take place require a small community. The very size of thetypicalmodern state precludes state politics frombeing amatter of commondeliberation (Dependent Rational Animals, p. 131). In the same vein, politics,conceived and carried out as a practice, requires a shared culture. But thevalue of such a political community is not constituted by its possession ofa shared culture; having a shared culture is simply a condition sine quanon for the carrying out of rational inquiry in common into the good. Theshared culture that is necessary is a culture of deliberation, the very sort ofculture that is needed for one to pursue in common an investigation that canput one’s traditions and shared culture to the question (MacIntyre 1997b,p. 241).It is with MacIntyre’s emphasis on the good of politics being a good of

inquiry that we can look back to theworries thatMacIntyre entertains aboutthe virtue of patriotism. In section 1 I noted that in his Lindley LectureMacIntyre considers the views of the patriotic antiliberal and the antipatri-otic liberal and raises objections to eachof their positions, objections that arenever satisfactorily resolved. We have seen already that MacIntyre’s worryabout antipatriotic liberalism is just that the carrying out of liberal objec-tives may very well require the sort of particular allegiance characteristic ofpatriotism that liberalism seems unable to provide. By contrast,MacIntyre’sworry about patriotism is simply that it involves one in a kind of blindness.To be a patriot, MacIntyre says, is to exempt from criticism one’s politicalcommunity, at least in some respect: MacIntyre identifies this respect withone’s political community conceived as a project (MacIntyre 1984e, p. 221).The liberal critic notes that the sustenance of one’s political community as aproject can be contrary to the best interests of humankind impartially con-sidered, and so patriotism presents a certain moral danger. But it seems tome that MacIntyre’s present identification of the goods internal to politicallife with goods of inquiry blunts the liberal’s criticism here. For the pointis that it will only be within properly functioning political communities as

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MacIntyre understands them that reasoners will have adequate resourcesfor putting anything effectively into question at all. To put it another way:the liberal’s worry is that allegiance to one’s political community will makeone unable to engage in rational criticism of one’s political community inlight of potentially competing goods. But MacIntyre’s point is that a po-litical community, when in good condition, is just that sort of communityin which one is enabled to engage in rational criticism of one’s politicalcommunity in light of potentially competing goods. Making clear that theproject of a justifiable political community is a project of rational inquiryenables the patriot to have allegiance to his or her political communitywith-out being subject to the criticism that patriotism involves a self-imposedmoral blindness.That the practice of politics offers a good that is common to members

of a political society makes possible, on MacIntyre’s view, a successful so-lution to the problem of political justification. But it also points the wayto an account of political justice – something that the neutralist state, withits refusal to appeal to anything more than a thin conception of the publicinterest, seemed unable to provide. The inability of plain persons to cometo agreement in matters of political justice, an inability echoed in the stale-mates in debate in academic philosophy, is a result of the loss of the notionof the common good of political life, a good which can serve as the stan-dard for matters of justice (After Virtue, pp. 250–251). Political justice isultimately a matter of what members of the political community deserve.MacIntyre here is, again, deeply Aristotelian: for one to be deserving ofsome goods, or some bads, there must be a common enterprise, and thosewho aremore deserving have contributedmore to that good, and those whoare less deserving have contributed less. Further, theremust be some sharedview as to how contributions to the common enterprise are to be measuredand how rewards are to be ranked (After Virtue, pp. 150–154; Whose Jus-tice?, pp. 106–107). Because this is so, questions of justice cannot even beginto be answered without the presence of those conditions under which theproper ordering of the practices within a community can be the object ofdeliberation. For the good, contribution to which is the ultimate standardof justice, and the scale of goods and bads that determines the deserts formembers of the political community, can be known only through politicaldeliberation. Members of the political community will deserve more or lessdepending on their contributions to the various practices that constitute thelife of the community, but the importance of their contributions can onlybe assessed once some sort of ordering of these goods, albeit a provisionalone, is reached.


Questions of political justice are going to be, to some extent, depen-dent upon the conditions that hold in a particular community: for whatmembers of that community deserve is going to depend on the proper or-dering of practices within that community, and how practices are properlyordered will depend on contingent circumstances. There is no guaranteethat there is one ordering of goods that is appropriate for every politicalcommunity, and thus there is no guarantee that the particular desert thatattaches to contributions to specific practices will be the same for all po-litical communities.3 But to allow that there is some variability in politicaljustice among political communities is not thereby to allow that there are nonontrivial standards of justice that hold in all political communities. Theseuniversal standards of justice MacIntyre identifies with the precepts of thenatural law.The precepts of the natural law, as MacIntyre understands them, are

in one sense substantive: they preclude an agent from engaging in certainsorts of attack on others, thus establishing these others as immune fromcertain harms. But the precepts of the natural law, as MacIntyre under-stand them, are in another sense procedural: they are justified as thoseprecepts that all agents must observe in order to engage in common enter-prises, which are, we should keep in mind, always at least in part enterprisesof common inquiry. As procedural, they are enabling rules4 that enablepersons to pursue ends in common, rather than mere side constraints onconduct.What needs explanation is how the substantive and the procedural as-

pects of the natural law come together on MacIntyre’s view. The idea isthat it is essential to the pursuit of common ends that those pursuing thembe able to expect immunity from certain sorts of harm at the hands of oth-ers. Think about it this way. Common projects are threatened by anythingthat disrupts, that makes impossible for a time, the communal ties of thosethat are participating in them. And certain kinds of harm – lies, betrayals,assaults, and so forth – invariably disrupt the communal relationships thatmake common inquiry and pursuit of goods possible. The natural law abso-lutely forbids us from performing such actions. We have reason to adhereto those precepts because adherence enables common pursuit of commongoods, goods that are, as we have already seen, partially constitutive of anddefining of our individual goods.Onemight wonder why these precepts are absolute in form, rather than,

for example: “refrain from (e.g.) assaults when refraining from assaults bet-ter promotes the pursuit of the common good than assaulting does.” Afterall, we can conjure up cases in which it might appear that the common

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good of a group might be better promoted by acting contrary to allegedlyabsolute precepts of the natural law. MacIntyre’s reply would be that itis crucial to the preservation of the communal relationships necessary forcommon inquiry that those involved in that inquiry not be willing to cal-culate whether assaulting, lying to, or betraying another member of theenterprise will better promote that enterprise. I cannot have the relation-ship of complete trust in a fellow inquirer into and pursuer of the good if thisfellow evinces a willingness, on some occasions, to lie to, betray, or assaultme. The natural law requires respect for “the preconditions of a kind ofrational conversation in which no one need fear being victimized by othersas the outcome of their engagement with those others.” (MacIntyre 1994a,p. 184)The natural law, on MacIntyre’s view, is eminently knowable. Partici-

pants in practices come naturally to be aware of its precepts because if aparticular exemplification of a practice fails to recognize them that exem-plification will disintegrate. Those who participate in practices must haveat least some sort of implicit awareness of the principles of the natural law,so that a basic, tacit knowledge of it can be ascribed to them; formulationof the principles of the natural law is thus an exercise in making explicitin reflection what is implicit in practice. (See MacIntyre 1997a, in whichMacIntyre considers the views of AnthonyLisska [Lisska 1996], John Finnis[Finnis 1980], and himself on this issue.) It is a signal merit of MacIntyre’saccount of the natural law that it is subject to empirical testing in a way thatother recent conceptions of natural law seem not to be.5 Note that evenwithin the practice of philosophical inquiry as presently carried out – whichis on the whole extraordinarily hostile to natural law thinking – there seemsto be a widespread, if usually implicit, agreement on the principles of thenatural law as MacIntyre characterizes them. Philosophers, even thoughhighly critical of natural law thinking, take a very dim view of false citation,betrayal of one’s colleagues, and assault on one’s philosophical enemies. It isnot just that they reject the correctness of an argument that one might giveon a particular occasion that false citation, betrayal, or assault ultimatelyfurthers the good of philosophical inquiry. It is that they reject any appeal toa consequentialist weighing as being inappropriate. So even the activity ofthose that are deeply skeptical of natural law thinking gives some testimonyto the truth of MacIntyre’s account of the natural law (MacIntyre 1994a,pp. 173–174).The conclusions for politics, then, are straightforward. Those institu-

tions that support the practice of politics must recognize and adhere to theprecepts of natural law if they are to be worthy of allegiance. And whether


such institutions are upholding the natural law is a matter to which allpersons, through the eminent knowability of the natural law, are compe-tent to pass judgment. No political institutions are insusceptible to thecritical scrutiny of those living under them, at least with respect to the mostbasic matters of justice (MacIntyre 1996a, p. 68).Now, MacIntyre’s recent endorsement of natural law as central to an

adequate conception of politics raises a question about the extent to whichMacIntyre’s views have undergone a transformation since After Virtue. Inthat work MacIntyre had echoed Bentham’s assessment of natural rightsas nonsense on stilts and had equated belief in natural rights with beliefin witches and unicorns (After Virtue, p. 69). In recent work, however, heis perfectly happy to talk about natural law; and natural law requires therecognition of an immunity of a rational inquirer to certain sorts of harmat the hands of others. But what is the recognition of this sort of immunityother than the recognition of a natural right?I do not think that MacIntyre’s views on this matter have altered: nat-

ural rights are still, on his view, nonsense on stilts. That there are certainways that human beings ought not to be treated, and that the fact that theyought not to be treated thus is not due to convention but nature, is notsufficient for the existence of a natural right. What is key is the locus ofjustification for the immunity – what gives point and purpose to refrainingfrom treating others in a certain way. Natural rights doctrines are charac-teristically individualistic in at least the following sense: each of them holdsthat the immunities that a human being enjoys by nature have as their locusof justification something intrinsic to that human being. Either that indi-vidual’s good (the so-called Interest conception of rights; see, for example,Raz 1986, pp. 165–192), or that individual’s choice about how to live his orher own life (the so-called Choice conception of rights; see, for example,Hart 1955, pp. 175–191), is supposed to ground the individual’s immunityto certain sorts of treatment. But rights understood in this way, MacIntyrethinks, are unintelligible. One has no natural interest in others’ receipt ofsome benefit, or in their choices to live a certain way. Since whatever else anatural right is supposed to be, it is supposed to provide reasons for othersto act in a certain way, natural rights do not make sense.By contrast, the immunities dictated by the natural law do not have

an individualistic basis. The reason for recognizing these immunities isthat their recognition is essential for the carrying out of common projects.The normative force of the immunities is borne by the common good, notsome individual’s private good. And insofar as the good that is common ispartially constitutive of the good of all of the individuals taking part in the

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activity, all have reasons to adhere to the natural law and thus to preservethese immunities. There is no significant shift in MacIntyre’s rejection of anatural rights perspective in ethics and politics.

3. TWO WORRIES

I want to close by considering two worries about the conception of politicsthat MacIntyre offers. The first has to do with whether the modern stateis necessarily as dismal a creature as MacIntyre makes it out to be. Thesecond has to do with the coherence of the notion of politics as a practicethat MacIntyre offers.As we have seen, MacIntyre’s verdict on the possibility of a political

justification of the modern state – a justification that would enable the stateto back up its claims to authority with adequate reasons – is entirely neg-ative. But MacIntyre is always careful to temper his condemnation of anyacceptance of the state’s global pretensions with endorsement of ad hocacceptance of the state’s benefits and sometime cooperation with the state’sworthwhile activities. (This tempering is itself tempered with reminders ofthe dangers to local community present in entangling itself too thoroughlywith the state.) Virtuousmembers of local communities “will recognize [thestate] as an ineliminable feature of the contemporary landscape and theywill not despise the resources that it affords. It may and on occasion doesprovide the onlymeans for removing obstacles to humane goals” (DependentRational Animals, p. 133). MacIntyre’s remarks suggest the following view:because the state is not going away, and because, given the existence ofthe state, there is often no way to achieve certain ends that practitioners ofthe politics of local community have reason to promote other than throughcooperation with the state, there will sometimes be occasions on whichpractitioners of the politics of local community have reason to acquiescewith or participate in the state’s initiatives. But this concession, sensible as itis, raises questions about whether practitioners of the politics of local com-munity, if there were no state, would find it necessary, or highly desirable,to invent it. And if it is indeed the case that practitioners of the politics oflocal community would find it necessary, or highly desirable, to invent someset of institutions like the state in some relevant respects, this would raisequestions about whether the state is, as MacIntyre describes it, a deeply,fundamentally flawed set of incoherent institutional structures, or whetherit is instead an admittedly imperfect realization of a fundamentally soundpolitical structure.


Here is an argument for the prima facie desirability, from the pointof view of a politics of local community, for a statelike set of institutions.As MacIntyre notes, no practices can go unsupported by institutions, forinstitutions are characteristically concerned with the provision of externalgoods, and practices, while aiming at goods internal to them, cannot get bywithout external goods (After Virtue, p. 194). The practice of politics willbe no different. In addition to those external goods necessary for carryingon the goods of common deliberation central to that practice, the factthat politics is about appropriately ordering all of the practices within acommunity’s life will make politics a practice that is particularly demandingin its need for external goods. For to order the practices in a community’slife will be, in part, to see to it that those practices more central to the lifeof the local community be better provided with respect to external goods,and indeed that all practices that are deserving in some way be supportedin their pursuits. And so there will need to be institutions that are ableto provide external goods – security, wealth, and so forth – in light of thedecisions reached within political practice.Now, there is, ceteris paribus, reason to pursue efficiency with respect

to the provision of such goods. (I will return to ways in which the ceterismay not be paribus below.) And so there would be very good reason forseveral local communities to sustain in common a set of institutions thatcould provide external goods to them all that would be much less efficientlyprovided by them individually. The premier example of an external goodlikely to be provided more efficiently in this way would be security fromexternal threats, and we may take this good as central to the defense of astatelike institution, a quasi-state, from the point of view of a politics of localcommunity.If several local communities saw the point of putting into place a statelike

institution, it would have several key features. First, the quasi-state wouldself-consciously have limited resources for communal deliberation, for, be-ing an institution that straddles several communities of deliberation, itwould recognize that the possibilities of extended debate would be far morelimited than can be entertained within such communities. Second, it wouldhave to proceed from a relatively thin theory of the good, concerned onlywith its limited mandate to provide a particular set of external goods for agiven set of local communities. And third, in demanding the support thatall institutions require in order to survive, it would have to make a dou-ble appeal. It would have to appeal to the goods of the local communitiesthemselves that are best realized with the provision of external goods. Butcommunities as well as individuals can be freeriders, and so such institutions

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would have to appeal to a conception of justice, articulated initially withinlocal communities but making demands that extend beyond their borders,to account for the reason freeriding is intolerable.There is a prima facie case from the point of view of the politics of local

community, then, for a quasi-state. Note some relevant similarities betweenthe quasi-state and the modern state that MacIntyre criticizes. It proceedson the basis of a thinner theory of the good than that endorsed by any of thecommunities that it seeks to serve, aiming to provide goods that are useful toeach. It has limited aspirations with respect to public deliberation about thegoods that it serves. And it calls for allegiance on the basis of the importanceof the goods that it provides to the local communities that it serves andon the basis of requirements of justice in distribution. Now, admittedly,modern states often overstep their bounds, and go beyond the quasi-state.Their claims to be the final objects of allegiance are overblown, and evenidolatrous. And they tend to make disastrous mistakes about the entitiesthat they serve: they tend to understand their service to be to individualssimply as such, and to ignore the key points to which MacIntyre draws ourattention – that individuals can only come to understand their good and toarticulate defensible conceptions of justice in local communities and withintraditions of inquiry. But it makes a great deal of difference with respect tothe success of MacIntyre’s criticism of the state whether it is best conceivedas a distorted, defective quasi-state or as an institution presupposing a setof first principles entirely at odds with the politics of local community.Now, MacIntyre could admit all of this while still denying that the state

is ultimately cast in any better light. For I admitted in my exposition ofthe quasi-state that in it the opportunities for common deliberation arelimited. And this may well doom the quasi-state from MacIntyre’s point ofview. Any institution that lacks the possibility formeaningful self-correctionthrough deliberation should be rejected as simply too unwieldy and dan-gerous. Quasi-states that overstep their bounds and make serious mistakeswith respect to theirmission – thus becoming toomuch likemodern states –are not sufficiently subject to correction. But this is, I think, where thereremains empirical work to be done. It needs to be asked what ways there arefor local communities to hold in check statelike institutions, and it needsto be asked whether, for all of the potential for overreaching by statelikeinstitutions, local communities are not in fact more successful in their ownterms within the context of states than outside of that context. This is verymuch in line with the sort of empirical inquiry into the conditions underwhich local communities flourish or languish that MacIntyre calls for in hismost recent work (Dependent Rational Animals, pp. 142–143).


The second line of criticism that I want to press against MacIntyre’sview to my mind generates far more serious difficulties for his position.Recall some of the salient features of practices as MacIntyre characterizesthem. What makes an organized activity a practice is, in part, that it isan activity through which goods internal to that activity are realized (AfterVirtue, p. 187). In labeling the goods of practices “internal” goods, hemeansto emphasize a contrast between those goods that can be defined only interms of the activity of a practice and those – “external” goods, such asmoney, power, status, etc. – that can be defined without reference to theparticularities of a practice. MacIntyre also takes it to be a defining featureof goods internal to practices that one who has not been initiated into andeducated within a practice is not competent as a judge of internal goods:such a person cannot appreciate them adequately, cannot understand whenthey have been achieved, and cannot discern greater or lesser achievementwith respect to the realization of those goods (After Virtue, pp. 188–189).MacIntyre thus places some emphasis on the virtue of educability: “Toenter into a practice is to accept the authority of those standards and theinadequacy of my own performance as judged by them. It is to subjectmy own attitudes, choices, preferences, and tastes to the standards whichcurrently and partially define the practice” (After Virtue, p. 190). Initiationinto practices is transformative: while persons often and characteristicallyenter practices for the sake of the external goods contingently associatedwith those practices, to be initiated into them is to bemade able to appreciateadequately the goods internal to them (After Virtue, p. 188).So far as I can tell, the notion that the goods internal to a practice

cannot be adequately known by outsiders, by those that have not beeninitiated into that practice, is an ineliminable part of MacIntyre’s accountof practices. To deny it would be to deny the distinction between internaland external goods, a distinction that is crucial inMacIntyre’s account of thevirtues. And so if it were to turn out that the thesis that “those who lack therelevant experience are incompetent thereby as judges of internal goods”(After Virtue, p. 189) makes trouble for MacIntyre’s conception of politics,the trouble could not be eliminated by mild revisions in his position.But the notion that goods internal to practices cannot be adequately

known by outsiders doesmake serious trouble forMacIntyre’s conception ofpolitics. For politics, as we have seen, is that practice concerned with properdeliberation about, and communal action regarding, the ordering of thepractices and the goods internal to those practices within a community. Butrational communal deliberation about the place of the goods of the differentpractices within the life of the community is bound to be a chimera. For

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such deliberation would have to be founded on an adequate appreciation byparticipants in that deliberation of the goods of the practices to be ordered,and no political deliberator could have all of the knowledge required. Noone can enter sufficiently into the multifarious practices that make up thelife of a community to be able adequately to appreciate the goods internalto each of those distinct practices. There are simply too many, and enteringinto a practice requires too much time, for adequate appreciation of thegoods to be ordered in political deliberation to be a live possibility forhuman beings.Now, one might respond that this objection to MacIntyre’s conception

of politics underestimates the resources for political deliberation that areprovided by such deliberation being common. Political deliberation is notprivate, but public. And so even if it is conceded that no individual deliber-ator would be able to deliberate rationally in political matters on his or herown, it is a commonplace about communal deliberation that the shortcom-ings of individual deliberators is remedied by the strengths of their fellows.What a single person does not know can be supplied by those that do. Butwhile it may often be true that individual deficiencies in knowledge canbe compensated for in communal deliberation, it does not seem to helpin this case. For the deliberation at issue concerns, essentially, comparativeknowledge – knowledge of the relative importance of different goods, ofhow some goods should or should not be subordinated to others. For oneperson to have intimate knowledge of the goods of one practice and foranother to have intimate knowledge of the goods of another practice doesnot help much at all in dealing with the question: how are the goods ofthese two practices to be ordered in the life of our community? A participantin one practice will not be able adequately to convey the importance of thegoods of his or her practice just through talking about it; MacIntyre notes“the meagerness of our vocabulary for speaking of [internal] goods” (AfterVirtue, p. 188) in emphasizing the point that knowledge of such goods is ac-quired only through experience within the relevant practice. So it does notseem that the knowledge of the goods needed to make rational judgmentsin political matters can be supplied by one’s fellow political deliberators.If this second line of criticism ofMacIntyre’s political philosophy is suc-

cessful, then we can go even further than the claim, defended in the firstline of criticism, that perhaps MacIntyre is wrong to dismiss the potentialof some statelike system of institutions. I suggested in the first line of crit-icism that a statelike system of institutions can be endorsed from withinMacIntyre’s politics of local community from a conjunction of three facts:first, that such communities practicing local politics would rationally want


an efficient provision of external goods; second, that an efficient provisionof external goods can be better brought about through an institution thatcrosses the boundaries of local communities; and third, that deliberationwithin such an institution would have to be far thinner than deliberationwithin any local community. But what this second line of criticism sug-gests is that if MacIntyre is committed to a conception of internal goods inwhich knowledge of such goods is denied to all but insiders, then rationaldeliberation that takes place within a politics of local community is goingto be far more austere than originally envisaged. The question, even withinlocal communities, cannot be: “Given the various practices that constitutethe life of the community, what relative importance should we ascribe toeach of these practices, so that those practices can be properly ordered inour common life?” The question will instead be something like: “Givenour individual inabilities to know the goods of these practices in anythinglike an adequate way, and given our collective inability to overcome theseindividual deficiencies, how is it reasonable to respond to the various prac-tices?” To retreat to this question is not to deny that there is a best wayto order the practices within political communities; it is only to deny thatknowledge of this best way is available to us, with our ineliminable humanlimitations.6

Notes

1. For an account of the sources of allegiance considered in United States SupremeCourt opinions, see Hall and Klosko 1998; for an understanding of the courts asthe prime example of public reason, see Rawls 1993, pp. 231–240.

2. Including the practice of politics itself: one question that will have to be answeredwill be about how the good of engaging in politics should be set against othergoods.

3. This is not to deny that for each political community there will be some bestway of ordering the goods in that community; that there is such a best way, or alimited class of best ways, is what makes politics as MacIntyre understands it amatter of seeking after truth.

4. The enabling character of the principles of the natural law is emphasized inMacIntyre 1994a, p. 177.

5. For example, Finnis 1980, pp. 33–34. Even my own is, sadly, subject to someversion of this criticism; see Murphy 2001, pp. 36–40.

6. I owe thanks to Paul Weithman and Ben Lipscomb for helpful comments ondrafts of this chapter. I also owe thanks to Alasdair MacIntyre, who in readingthis chapter exhibited his usual just generosity in both receiving and offeringcriticism.

7 MacIntyre’s Critique of ModernityT E R R Y P I N K A R D

The modern period is usually dated as beginning roughly in 1789, the yearnot only of the FrenchRevolution but also of the opening of the new federalgovernment in the United States and correspondingly the securing of thatcountry’s newnationally oriented commercial society.Within a short periodof time, “modernity” sawdemocratic revolutions, authoritarian revolutions,and the explosive growth of industrial society. There are now many whothink that the modern period has run its course and is giving way to a newform of “postmodern” civilization.Modernity, with its factories and steam engines, its mass culture and its

creation of weapons of immense destruction, has long been the object ofboth admiration and dislike. Its admirers tend to see it as marking progressbeyond what preceded it: human life has been lengthened in industrialsociety, many of the great masses who were formerly excluded have be-come empowered, wealth has increased, and freedom has become the greatwatchword across the globe. (Even the capitalism-critical Marxists boughtinto their own version of the idea of progress.) However, modernity hasalso been the object of intense, emotional attack, and in the late eighteenthand early nineteenth century in Germany, criticizing modernity becamea genre unto itself. Even before the onset of industrialization, people likeF. H. Jacobi were already expressing dismay in the emerging trust in reasonto solve all our problems and were criticizing all Enlightenment thoughtas potentially “nihilistic” (a term Jacobi coined) – enlightened reason, soJacobi’s claim went, could tear things down, but it could not satisfactorilybuild anything up to replace it. Indeed, the forces of modernity simply de-stroyed all that was good and beautiful and replaced it with an alienated,potentially godless moral wasteland.There are easily typified reactions to the distresses of modernity. One

is to want to accelerate Enlightenment thought to its completion: the onlycure for the ills inflicted by the Enlightenment, so the saying goes, is moreEnlightenment. The other is to indulge in nostalgia, which in the nine-teenth century was quite often coupled with an intense desire actually to

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MacIntyre’s Critique of Modernity 177

turn the clock back, to restore a lost world; that desire in the twentiethcentury has been more typically associated with a kind of cultural despair.As a form of cultural despair, nostalgia takes the form of wishing that thatwe had never lost the innocence that we formerly had, and while it im-plicitly accepts the fact that the clock cannot be turned back, it still seesthe movement forward in history as nonetheless inevitable, although al-together for the worse, and quite often is driven to the rather quietistconclusion, as Heidegger so famously put it, that “only a god can save usnow” (a statement made some time after Heidegger had already sufferedthe ignominy of his support of a self-appointed German demigod to dothe job).Jacobi’s attack on “Enlightenment” – by which he meant “modernity” –

was both a cultural and a philosophical attack. If the culture of modernitywas lacking, its predicamentwas traceable to the philosophical view inwhichthat culture was rooted, which, for Jacobi, was the culture and philosophybased on universalizing reason. That “modern” outlook had brought fortha world of alienated people unable to be at home in their world, whose liveswould therefore in some crucial sense be stunted or lacking in a kind ofdepth that they had earlier possessed.MacIntyre has also been a fierce critic of modernity, and one of the key

elements of his most famous book, After Virtue, is an attack on the fail-ure of the “Enlightenment Project.” His celebrations of the philosophicalsuperiority of both Aristotle and, most recently, Thomas Aquinas, alongwith his admiring descriptions of ancient Athens and Catholic medievalEurope, along with his own closing of After Virtue with the lines aboutwaiting for a new Saint Benedict to save us from modernity’s barbarians(After Virtue, p. 263), certainly make it natural to interpret MacIntyre assome kind of slightly Romantic elegist for the past, a man confounded bythe moral laxness of the present, hoping that it all will somehow just goaway – maybe even wishing that we would all turn our computers off andgo back to writing with quill pens on rag paper.The charge of nostalgia quite naturally has been an underlying theme

in much of the criticism of MacIntyre’s work, but it is a serious misreadingof his key ideas. In MacIntyre’s writings one indeed finds an admirationof much of ancient Greece, but one also continuously finds in that sameworkmore or less condemnatory judgments that it was based on slavery andthe oppression of women; Aristotle, while praised, is convicted of grievousmistakes, among them his endorsement of the idea of natural slavery; and,for MacIntyre, the inequalities of the medieval world clearly disqualify itfrom serving as the perfect model of human development. On the other

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hand, what makes Aristotle, Aquinas, ancient Athens, and the medievalsappealing is that they all involved a way of thinking about and living outnonindividualist ways of life in which the “individual” was not taken to bethe ultimate, irreducible unit of political and social discourse, the “indi-vidual” was not taken to have rights prior to his relationship to others,and the status of institutions was not solely to provide “individuals” withthe means for efficiently realizing their desires or for “actualizing” their“selves.”TounderstandMacIntyre’s dissatisfactionwithmodernity, one therefore

has to look in places other than the Romantic nostalgia for a nonexistent,unified and harmonious past in order to find the other sources of his distastefor modernity, in particular the rather politically conservative Max Weberand the non-Marxist socialist Karl Polanyi.Polanyi’s influence on MacIntyre is quite straightforward (see Polanyi

1975). In the 1940s and 1950s, Polanyi challenged the conventional wisdomthat economics was a value-free science that only described and explainedwhat all rational persons would, under very rarefied conditions, freely electto do. Instead, he argued that modern economics only formalizes a con-tingent, modern sense of the cash economy and modern capitalism; forPolanyi, not only are alternative arrangements of the economy possible,but it is the case that many past and present societies have in fact presentedus with such alternatives. In saying this, Polanyi was by no means inspiredby nostalgia for the past; he simply wanted to undermine the notion thatthemodern economy and its attendant conceptions of rationality, exchange,and efficiency were natural and inevitable. Premodern economies, for ex-ample, did not presuppose such notions but were instead based on notionsof reciprocity: each person in such an order produced or performed the taskat which they were best, and the whole was then redistributed among thesociety at large. The fundamental glue holding such premodern economiestogether was not the desire to further one’s own (narrow or broad) interestsbut to establish one’s standing in society by performing well and virtuouslythose tasks that society required and expected of oneself. Such premod-ern economies thus rested on a shared but rarely explicit sense of whatthe “whole” required of them, and on a shared but rarely explicit under-standing of what the whole owed to them. For Polanyi the individual wasneither submerged nor crushed by the social wholes; both the individualand the social whole had their place, and each received its due in such anorder.Market economies, on the other hand, abolish that shared understand-

ing. Markets operate only on price, not on orientation to the social whole.


Unfettered from social roles, the individual produces and acts not in termsof how he is contributing to the social whole, nor in terms of the impactof his actions on the social whole at large, but only in terms of whether hisbehavior can “clear” the market (whether the price for his labor or goods istoo high). However, all economic relationships, Polanyi argued, ultimatelyhave their basis in a certain feature of human sociality, namely in our needto appear to others in certain ways, to gain standing in their eyes. In marketsocieties, this ultimately takes place through the acquisition of status itemsand simply of more money itself. In saying this, though, Polanyi neverheld that capitalism was only a way station to full socialism, nor did heendorse the Marxist view that individualism was only an ideology by whichthe bourgeoisie maintained its control over the means of production. Heonly wanted to argue that modern economics is not written into the natureof rationality or into the metaphysical structure of human agency. Thereare and have been alternatives, and understanding the sheer contingencyof modern economic life can free us up to think about what our modernalternatives to capitalism might be.Weber’s well known critique of the rise of modernity also has an obvious

influence onMacIntyre’s thought. InWeber’s telling of the story, the rise ofcapitalism represents the triumph of the “spirit of Protestantism,” a kind ofshorthand for political and moral individualism. Once such individualism isaccepted, then social and political theory have to begin with the question ofwhat rights or moral claims these individuals have prior to their being con-ceived in terms of their social relations; against such a backdrop, the onlyplausible scenario is some type of social contract among such individuals,and the reasoning that establishes the contract is ultimately instrumentalreasoning. Following up on Polanyi’s point about the historical embed-dedness of economic relations, MacIntyre takes over Weber’s point thatprior to the rise of capitalism – of individualism, modernity – instrumentalrationality was given its due share in the social order by a larger viewof the whole that kept it in check, and that larger view was itself sus-tained by the social authority of religion. As the new form of economic,capitalist activity took over in Northern Europe, individualist models ofsocial life quickly eroded the social bases of authority that religion hasformerly claimed for itself. Religion gradually became socially powerlessand was relegated to the realm of private belief and private inspiration.Where religion had been, individualist modes of reasoning and social or-ganization stepped in, and in place of a conception of society as structuredaround common goods, the basis of legitimacy came to be the efficiencywith which the rulers or the basic structure of society provided economic

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goods (and maintained the liberal political goods that were a conditionof achieving the economic goods). Instead of the good and publicly ful-filling life, modernity substituted a promise only of increasing wealth andprivate satisfaction (provided one has the requisite skills to prosper in themarketplace).It is not hard to see how elements of both Polanyi’s and Weber’s story

coalesce in MacIntyre’s own account. In both Polanyi’s and Weber’s nar-rations, modern individualism replaces something older and breaks apartwhat had been a unified, more or less harmonious social whole; how-ever, in neither Weber’s nor Polanyi’s narration is that social whole ro-manticized, and in both cases, there is an appeal to an underlying humannature that explains why such a system came to replace what had pre-ceded it. It is this more hard-edged (and itself much more modern),nonnostalgic sense of modernity that is behind Polanyi’s, Weber’s, andMacIntyre’s criticism of the modern transformation. The great Romanticnotion of an original, harmonious unity that has shattered into fragmentsand whose memory remains as a project for the future reconstitution ofthe original harmony is for the most part absent from MacIntyre’s writ-ings (although faint traces of it admittedly appear from time to time inthem).What seems to provoke MacIntyre’s ire is the unspoken assumption

that the point at which we have ended up – in the triumph of global cap-italism and the widespread affirmation of the market as the only propersocial institution to deal with our problems – is necessary (that we had toend up in this place in history), is the only proper or authentic expressionof unalloyed human nature (that it is the only social system that fits hu-man nature instead of being at war with it), or represents progress over thepast. Like the progressive modernists who so much displease him, MacIn-tyre sees modernity as not simply a historical periodization or a “style” (tobe found, for example, in art) but as an unprecedented rupture in humantime, something that marks a new and fundamentally different beginningand presents fundamentally new options for human life. To see the present,however, as progress is essentially to endorse it as something against whichit would only be irrational to complain since it represents an essential im-provement on what came before it, and any attempt to undo it (especiallyin the name of any of the older goods and values that it claims to havesuperseded) could, if successful, only count as a loss. Indeed, MacIntyre’ssustained attack on the notion that “the present is progress” has fueled thatidea that he must be some kind of nostalgic premodern thinker, a kind ofIrish-Scottish Heidegger, wishing, as it has been unkindly said, for all of us


to return to some vanished Catholic world in which the cacophony of themodern condition is absent.Any reasonably close reading of his work, however, belies such an in-

terpretation. MacIntyre clearly endorses all kinds of very “modern” socialmovements (the women’s movement, claims for minority rights, and soforth) that under no stretch of the imagination could be imagined to bethe kinds of things that a return to some premodern condition would un-derwrite, and one does not find any hint that MacIntyre would like to turnback the clock on those developments. MacIntyre does not so much callfor a return to the past as for a rethinking of what is actually required of amodern conception that could endorse the “progressive” social movementsthat have led to recognition of minority and women’s rights while at thesame time dispensing with the underlying conceptions that have seemed tobe necessary to justify those rights.MacIntyre’s major criticism of modernity has to do with its underlying

individualism, the practical failures of that form of individualism, and thesocial structures and modern philosophies that systematically distort ourabilities to comprehend any real alternative to themselves. In After Virtue,he introduced this notion with his now-famous analogy of the loss of sci-ence: just as we can imagine a world in which various people try (fruitlessly)to revive vanished scientific practice (not understanding that what theyweredoing was completely different from the way science was actually done), weshould understand our own modern world as having lost the practices ofthe virtues, such that modern attempts to speak of the virtues can only befalsifications, pale and failed attempts at doing something in a new contextthat only had its home in another, older, vanished context. This analogyseems to suggest that if retrieving the virtues was important, the only wayto do that would be to turn back the clock. However, MacIntyre’s proposalhas never been for us even to attempt to move back to a premodern, nonin-dividualist society; he has instead suggested what alternative process wouldbe necessary for a new, nonindividualist society of the future to take shape.If anything, MacIntyre’s critique of modernity is better characterized asrevolutionary than as reactionary. For MacIntyre, the rupture in humantime that modernity represents is therefore to be understood as some kindof error that, while marking out fundamentally new possibilities for in-dividual and collective life, unfortunately also diminishes human life andmust itself be “overcome” in the way it overcame the premodern world itreplaced.“Individualism” inMacIntyre’s sense has at least three aspects to it: (1) It

holds that all the resources needed to generate correctmoral judgments and

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to act on them exist within the individual; (2) It holds that any sharedmoral-ity can therefore only come about in the form of some kind of basic agree-ment about choices, attitudes, and/or preferences; (3) It holds that socialinstitutions can therefore only be understood as means through which in-dividuals give expression to their preferences and aims, and through whichthey achieve their ends. (For a short statement of this view, see MacIntyre1990b). What is wrong about such individualism, so MacIntyre seems tothink, is not so much that it denies a metaphysical fact about human agents,but rather that it represents a kind of practical failure on their part. That is,he does not deny that we can be or become individualists in the relevantlymisguided sense, nor does he claim that, for example, we must always tran-scendentally presuppose some kind of nonindividualism when conceivingof ourselves as individualist agents of the type he scorns. His argument isnot analogous, for example, to Kant’s argument that when deliberating andacting we simply cannot regard ourselves from the practical point of view asdetermined in our choices, and thus all determinism founders on a practical(even if not theoretical) impossibility.Fundamental toMacIntyre’s view is that one’s status as an agent is bound

up with one’s capacities for practical reasoning, and those capacities can-not be understood outside of the social and biological contexts in whichthey are realized. To have a reason for action is something humans sharewith certain higher animals (dolphins are MacIntyre’s examples of choice),since having a reason for action has to do with the goods to be obtainedby those actions. A human or a dolphin can be said to have certain goods(given their natures, both biological and social), and one must understandmuch of their behavior as an aiming at those goods (at least in terms ofthe way the world appears to them – dolphins, like humans, can be mis-taken about that world). Some higher animals aim at their good, and, soMacIntyre controversially also argues, can be said both to engage in socialpractices and to alter their behavior accordingly. To the extent that thoseconditions are met, such higher animals should, along with humans, besaid to have reasons for actions (and, so MacIntyre also argues, althoughthere is no need to elaborate here, thereby also to possess conceptual ca-pacities) (Dependent Rational Animals, pp. 43–51). Whereas both humansand the higher animals may thus be said to have reasons for action, onlyhumans have, however, the power of reasoning, since that requires thekind of sophisticated linguistic, and therefore social, capacities that appar-ently only humans possess. It also follows, so he thinks, that our capacitiesfor reasoning should not be opposed to our animal natures but shouldbe viewed as the realizations of certain natural powers within us, powers


that have a less fully actualized form in higher animals and in ourselves asinfants.If agency is to be understood as a capacity both to have reasons and to

reason in light of them, themost obvious question to ask isKantian in spirit –“are there logical conditions under which any agent at all must reason, orare there conditions that set the boundaries or determine what counts as aninstance of successful practical reasoning?” – and the usual answer has to dowith something like impartiality or universality of reasoning. MacIntyre,however, not only denies that this is the proper question, he also thinksthat it is a seriously misleading “modernist” answer. Having a reason isonly intelligible in terms of there being some goods for an organism interms of which it adapts its behavior. Reasoning, on the other hand, refers tothe way in which humans (social creatures possessing language) go aboutmoving from having reasons to regulating their behavior to altering theirconceptions of what it even means to have a reason in the first place. To theextent that we think about having a reason and reasoning in any substantiveway, our notions of both of them are bound up with whatever substantivegoods we take to be the objects of those reasons. Thus, what counts foran agent will never be best understood abstractly as “the” good at whichhe or she is aiming; it will always be a specific conception of a good, whichin turn will affect what will count as the appropriate reasoning about it,and it is only out of these more specific acts of reasoning about goodsthat we finally generate some more general notion of the “human good”per se.1

This is crucial for MacIntyre since he holds that when we change ourdeterminate conceptions of the goods at issue, we also thereby change ourdeterminate conceptions of what it means for each of us, individually andcollectively, to be the kinds of historically specific agents that we are. Some-one for whom “the good” is simply the satisfaction of one’s desires will takethe appropriate model of reasoning to be more or less instrumental and willhave a very determinate conception of the kind of agent one is, what placeone has in society, what kinds of things are rationally appropriate for oneto suffer or endure, and so forth. Alternatively, someone who conceives of“the good” as the successful execution of a social role and as establishingone’s standing in the eyes of the appropriate others will not take such instru-mental reasoning as the appropriate model but will more likely have a morecomplex model of reasoning as deliberation about what will appropriatelyachieve the good and the best in such and such a type of situation in whichone finds oneself. This agent will have, no doubt, a different conceptionof what is worth enduring, what is worth suffering, and for what one can

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reasonably hope than the former agent. (In fact, in the latter case, an agentengaging in such instrumental reasoning, seeking the most efficient meansto look good, will be judged to have failed in the attempt at establishingindividual standing.)In MacIntyre’s view, therefore, moral reality itself changes as concep-

tions of the good themselves change – there is neither one moral reality outthere waiting for us to respond to it, nor a substantive constraint bound upwith the formal conditions of constructing such a reality (as there mightbe for a Kantian). Rather, there are different moral realities relative tothe different conceptions of the good at work in different substantive con-ceptions of practical reasoning. The issue therefore is not: “What is theone true moral reality (against which all the competitors are merely illu-sions or perversions) that has to be presupposed in all moral judgments?”but rather: “What is the moral reality that proves to be the best in somenon-question-begging way in its encounters with alternative moral reali-ties?” Leaving open the possibility that that there is a “best” moral realitythat can emerge out of competing moral traditions leaves MacIntyre openalso to endorse a historicized form of moral realism (a topic to which weshall return).The answer for MacIntyre is to be found in a combination of a moral

reality’s coherence within itself and the way in which it promotes (or failsto promote) some kind of human flourishing. In particular, modern moralreality (the conception of goods at work in it and the appropriate structureof practical reasoning that accompanies it) has within itself, on MacIntyre’saccount, a deep incoherence that makes it actually damaging to the agentswho live within it.But why is such incoherence, if it really is there, so damaging? What

is so bad about living with such incoherence? (Is fear of contradiction thehobgoblin of small minds?) For MacIntyre, what is at stake is not just anyold set of contradictions (such as might be found in the “paradox of thepreface” and similar conundrums) but an incoherence, if not contradiction,in the structure of agents’ practical reasoning such that they find themselvespursuing certain types of goods in ways that undermine their ability ever toachieve those goods fully or to achieve them at all. The kind of incoherenceat stake has to do with the basic premises of practical reasoning, and thatincoherence fundamentally alienates agents from themselves, from nature,and from each other. (There is no doubt a not accidental resemblance tothe young Marx’s theory in play here.)A form of practical reasoning undermines itself when the conditions for

its success make it impossible for it to fully succeed. To see this is to go


to the heart of MacIntyre’s social-practice theory of rationality and to whyhe thinks that such incoherence is a feature of modernity and not just anindividual failure to hold fast to the right norms. If one contrasts this witha kind of simple Kantian conception of holding oneself to norms, one cansee MacIntyre’s point. (I will call this a simple form of Kantianism in orderto sidestep all the intricate textual and philosophical issues about whetherthis “really is” Kant, or whether, even if it is, there is a better reading ofKant that avoids these errors.) For the simple Kantian, the source of suchincoherence could only lie in the agents themselves: One who imposesthe rules for behavior on oneself can alone can be responsible for suchincoherence and can remove it; for the simple Kantian, such incoherencefrom the social point of view at best reveals something about lacks in thestructure of coordination among independent agents, or perhaps problemsabout freeriders and the like, and at worst simply points to some deep factsuch as “radical evil” at work in human nature (the propensity to substituteself-interest for the moral law).In MacIntyre’s social-practice conception of rationality, however, there

can be no such thing as the simple Kantian’s self-imposition of the law.MacIntyre does not of course deny that there can be individual failure tolive up to the demands of morality; he claims only that certain types offailure are not best construed as individual failings but as social breakdownselicited by deep contradictions within that way of life. Reasoning is alwayscarried out in terms of shared, socially established standards and in light ofwhat he calls a “tradition” (a more or less technical term for him, mean-ing an inquiry directed toward a truth independent of the inquiring mind,whose normative standards are developed over time in light of the problems,anomalies, and clashes with other such traditions that appear in its history).MacIntyre’s point about the social nature of rationality follow some famil-iar post-Hegelian, post-Wittgensteinian lines of thought: No sense can begiven to the notion of a private language (of words whose meanings consistin links to private mental states known only to their possessor) or of a kindof rule following that is carried out entirely by one’s own individual privateapprehensions of what the rule requires since, in both cases, the distinctionbetween really following the rule and only thinking that one was followingthe rule would be obliterated and with that, all notion of rule following andintelligible action itself would vanish. Instead, any adequate conception of(particularly practical) reasoning will have to be substantive and not merelyformal in character.Practical reasoning is inherently substantive since it cannot even be

identified without reference to the goods it seeks to realize. The very

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notion of having a reason for action is completely dependent on the no-tion of there being a good that is to be realized or obtained in the action(Dependent Rational Animals, p. 24). Having a reason is thus tied up withthe notion of being an organism (at least of a certain type) that aims at itsown good as it registers it, engages in social practices, and alters its behav-ior in light of those practices. With humans, there are clearly goods thatcan only be realized in an appropriate social setting – for example, that ofa satisfying career – and the modes of practical reasoning must take intoaccount what is necessary for the realization of those goods, particularlywhat kinds of suppression or reeducation of desire are necessary if suchgoods are to be achieved. It involves MacIntyre’s well-known view that acertain type of character, a possession of a certain set of virtues, is neces-sary for the realization of these goods. For MacIntyre, there cannot be anysimple Kantian priority of practical reason (or a purely formal conceptionof practical reason) from which substantive goods are then inferred (as infact it looks like Kant himself is doing in theMetaphysics of Morals, where hededuces the two obligatory ends of benevolence and self-perfection fromthe unconditionally binding practical law).If certain types of goods are only possible in some forms of social rela-

tionships and not in others, then it makes all the difference as to what thoserelationships might be. In that connection, it is worth noting how, in allof MacIntyre’s writings, the themes of dependence and independence arealways present and always coupled, although they sometimes function onlyin the background. A key element of all of his writings has to do with thenecessity of the formation and sustenance of the virtues, which requires usto acknowledge our dependence on others and on certain types of socialpractices and institutions to make acquisition and sustenance of the virtuespossible. These types of dependency can take different forms, but they arenot ultimately malleable, and it seems that some forms of social life canclearly distort the ways in which those dependencies are recognized andresponded to – distort them in the sense that they make us blind in ourpractical reasoning to these dependencies or to their ineluctability.The two lenses through whichMacIntyre views these problems – a lan-

guage of realism, of a distortion of the true way in which we should viewmoral reality, and a language of constructivism, as a failure to construct therules and principles by which we live in a rational manner – points to afundamental element, if not tension, in his thought, which links him withKant and the other German idealists in ways he himself often downplays.His realism (moral and otherwise) is quite apparent in all his writings and isdistinctly emphasized inWhose Justice? Which Rationality?, where he rejects


all notions of truth as “warranted assertability” in favor of a more realist,Thomistic (in a reinterpreted sense) concept of truth.2 However, as eventhe title ofWhose Justice? Which Rationality? already indicates, he also sub-scribes to some kind of historicist view of moral reality in light of whichmoral reality itself changes over time.What distinguishesMacIntyre’s viewsfrom what looks like the relativism implicit in such historicism is his notionof rationality, that only those moral realities that can be rationally defendedare suitable and are livable. He thinks, that is, that only in a rationally de-fensible moral reality can we actually be the kinds of agents who flourish inthe proper ways, and that, ultimately, irrational modes of social and moralreality inflict so many psychological wounds on their members that theycan only be sustained both by the construction of elaborate ideologies thatjustify the suffering imposed as historically or socially necessary and bysustaining practices and institutions that, although inimical to the reign-ing social practice, are necessary for its sustenance (as soothing the woundsthat are otherwise inflicted or preventing the entire social order fromunder-mining itself by the force of its irrationality and unlivability) (seeMacIntyre1990b). To do the latter – keep alive the matters that the practice under-mines but without which the practice could not survive – the ideologiesin turn have to function so as to distort or even conceal what is actuallygoing on.MacIntyre’s notion of “moral error” as brought on by insufficient social

practice thus puts him disturbingly close to his bete noire, Kantianism. TheKantian position, quite generally, is that “goodness” or “value” is not foundin the world but is instead legislated or constructed by human agents, andthe condition under which all such legislation must fall is that of rationaljustifiability. Objective principles of morality – and thus a robust doctrine ofmoral error – are possible because and only because of this constraint.Whatseparates MacIntyre from Kant is MacIntyre’s semi-Hegelian rejection ofthe more specifically Kantian notion of rational justifiability in favor of thepriority of a more substantive notion of reason: It is only in light of ourconception of specific types of goods that we form notions of having reasonsand reasoning correctly, and those conceptions of goods themselves have ahistory and are not simply “seen” by us or follow directly from some verygeneral conception of formal reasoning.Because of this, MacIntyre is led to construct his notion of “tradi-

tion” and of “tradition-constituted inquiry” to highlight just why he thinksKantianism is not the position toward which he is pushed. That is, if moralerror is to be accounted for in terms of a failure to justify one’s actions, thenwe need a conception of reason and rational justifiability that is capable of

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showing that some types of practical judgments are true (or are in error),but which does not claim that there is only one possible perspective on suchjustification. That requires a historicized conception of rational justifica-tion, which, in MacIntyre’s rendering, has to do with the way in which onetradition of inquiry can resolve anomalies found in another that the othercould not in its own terms resolve.3 That is, it has to be the case that inad-equate moral realities eventually can be shown to be insufficient in light ofthe irrationality of the way that such moral realities make goods availableand present for their participants (and the substantive modes of practicalreasoning that attach to such goods) in comparison to some other way oflife (and, consequently, way of reasoning). It need not be the case that in-adequate and wounding ways of living undermine themselves and thus cometo require something different from themselves (although in principle theymay be so intolerable as to collapse under their own weight); rather, whenconfronted with an alternative “tradition” or way of life that explains tothem why their agents inflict such psychological wounds on themselves andare blind to other kinds of goods, they find ultimately that the alternativebeing presented is superior to the way in which they had been living to thatpoint.For MacIntyre as much as for the Kantians, an agent is motivated by

what he takes to be good reasons for action. The “motivational force” of theexistingmoral reality has to do with the kinds of reasons that are available tothe agents within that set of social relationships and practices. Sincemodernsocial relationships are structured around individualist self-understandings,modern people, so MacIntyre’s story goes, find that the major motivatingreasons for them are either matters of bargaining for rational self-interestor matters having to do with emotional sympathies or antipathies. Yet noneof these modes of reasoning (none of the powerful modern sources of mo-tivation) can dispense with nonmodern reasons for action having to dowith acknowledged and unacknowledged dependencies; the way of life inwhich social relationships are based either on bargaining or sympathies isitself unsustainable unless there are relationships holding the whole to-gether, relationships which themselves are neither matters open to bar-gaining nor matters reducible to blind sentiments.Yet in all this, MacIntyre’s retains his acceptance of the idea that moder-

nity represents something qualitatively different, a crucial rupture in humanhistory, and it is thus crucial for him to show that modern liberal individu-alism is not necessary, that it is at best only one tradition among many, andthus can itself be defeated by a demonstration of its inherent irrationalityand of the existence of a live alternative that is free from those irrationalities.


MacIntyre thus has as his target something like Hegel’s conception of the“rationality of the actual,” namely by showing that themotivational force ofthe “actual,” of the existing moral reality, is fundamentally irrational, thatthere is no way in principle to reorder it so that it is rational, and that thetraditions that it claims to have already defeated are in fact still alive.The notion of defeated traditions is crucial for MacIntyre to make his

claim, since he clearly does not claim that all of modernity is to be dis-carded. (He does not, as for example Heidegger sometimes seems to do,throw modern science into the same wicker as modern capitalism, and heclearly has no sympathy to those who bemoan the rise of civil rights forminorities and oppressed peoples; nor does he see all of modern cultureas an expression of some kind of vague “technocracy,” however much hederides the dominance of instrumental reasoning in the culture at large.)Pre-Galilean and pre-Newtonian science, for example, is clearly a defeatedtradition. By virtue of having been decisively defeated by the force of betterreason, it is no longer on the cultural agenda, and any attempts to revive suchscience are doomed. Likewise, MacIntyre would hold that all the variousforms of premodern and early-modern slavery are equally off the politicaland cultural agenda. Even if clever scholarship can find ways to reinter-pret Aristotle’s thoughts on slavery so as to make some sense of them in amodern context, still there can be no sense in trying to revive slaveryper se.Yet at least two major problems remain if MacIntyre is willing to accept

that what he views as “defeated traditions” are really defeated: first, there istheproblemofwhether thenotionof a “tradition” (which is further specifiedas a “tradition of inquiry”) is itself adequate and not too intellectualistic toprovide an account of the kinds of existential breakdowns of ways of lifeconsistent with the rest of his thought; and second, there is the question ofwhether he is committed to the possibility of “defeating”modernity in awaythat is itself undercut by his own arguments. The second of these is themorecrucial consideration. On the one hand, MacIntyre sees modern culture asthe outcome of a series of social and economic forces that have resulted ina mode of practical reasoning that itself produces a deficient moral realityfor the participants of modern moral life – deficient in the sense of beingirrational, an irrationality that leaves in its wake profound alienation andwounded psyches. On the other hand, he wants to see the developmentof modernity as a completely contingent, even irrational series of events,whose justification was lacking at the time and whose adequate justificationhas not since appeared. On MacIntyre’s account, that modern tradition –with its attendant individualism – has been defeated in the sense that all the

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arguments in its favor can be and have been shown to be deficient, althoughit is clear that, in any cultural or political sense, it not only has not beendefeated, it is apparently even stronger than ever.However, there are powerful arguments in MacIntyre’s own work for

concluding that the kind of fragmented modernity he decries simply can-not be defeated in the way that much of his work suggests it can. The verythings he accepts – the rise of modern science, the rejection on grounds ofjustice of the exclusion of oppressed peoples from power – are the kinds ofmatters that underwrite the impossibility of forging the kindof authoritativeconsensus he often seems to advocate. MacIntyre wants to see social rela-tionships as contingent and our own standards of reasoning as contingent;yet he also wants to understand the moral reality brought about by thoserelationships as necessitating some attempt at justification of them. In thatcontext, the problemof the existence of a “natural” standard of practical rea-soning – taking “natural” here in its eighteenth-century sense as embodyingthose standards that are “fixed” in contrast with the variable standards of“positive” law – appears just as acute for MacIntyre, who eschews appealto pre-Galilean conceptions of nature, as it is for the Kantians who acceptthe same thing. It may well be that our rational capacities should be seenas the realization of natural powers and not as something so far differentfrom them that they belong to a different order of being (or have to beseen as manifestations of a wholly different type of substance). But it stillis not the case that nature sets the normative standards of practical reasoningor that practical reasoning is only a perfection of some latency already therein nature. (Some such argument may be implicit in the Naturphilosophie ofmetaphysical idealists such as Schelling, but that is another story.) Practicalreasoning arises against the background of natural life, but its norms arenot determined by that background; it is social, and therefore, in Hegel’ssense, a “negation” of nature, a departure from the regularities of nature,such that it becomes in human life a “second” nature.4

Nor can MacIntyre accept the quasi-organic notion that competingconceptions of rationality simply “fit” their times, grow with them, andlive and die with them. For him, it is crucial not to understand reasonsas simply having a hold on people and “fitting” them like some evolvingparasitic organism; rather, it is crucial to understand the justifiability of thehold that they have, the way in which agents’ basic orientation is somethingthat makes up what they are, and in his work the claim is always right underthe surface that failure of rationality, failure to collectively hold ourselvesto certain norms, is what undermines ways of life. If so, then the specificallymodern issue of self-determination – the issue first explicitly raised by Kant,


even if prefigured mightily in Rousseau – and the conditions under whichsuch collective and individual self-determination is possible, are as muchproblems for MacIntyre as they are for Kant and all the post-Kantians.Appealing to natural goods will not help matters here, even if clarificationof the centrality of our natural dependencies and our continuity with theanimalworld (in contrast both to classical dualism and contemporary single-minded naturalism) is brought front and center, as MacIntyre himself soeffectively does. The Reformation did not happen because people failedto reason through things correctly; the emerging sense of the individual,already making its first fledgling appearances in Giotto’s frescoes with theirmore realistic and individually realized faces, were already pointing to theway in which the hold of the medieval church – that is, its capacity toprovide the binding reasons for collective life – was under pressure fromthe very forces that Christian culture had set in motion. The very thingsthat MacIntyre decries – the excessive individualism of modern life and theway in which its social institutions and market society shape a moral realitycentered around the satisfaction of sovereign individual desire – themselvescould not take place until a Christian conception of equality beforeGod hadcome tobe realized as the only alternative to the collapse of the slave-owningsocieties of antiquity. The basic norm behind the moral reality in whichrational choice theory (with its attendant freerider and prisoner’s dilemmaproblems) really is one of the going options is one in which the individualagent can find no reason to subordinate his desires to some authority otherthan his own self-interest, and that presupposes the breakdown of the kindof hierarchical set of social relationships to which people had formerly hadsomuch allegiance. Indeed, theChristian appeal to the equality of all beforeGod is both an expression of and a response to the collapse of the bindingpower of natural mastery, of the existence of some in the world to whomothers must simply submit their will because nature has decreed some tobe better than others. That Christian critique of the ancient world notonly made it possible for individuals to see themselves as being intrinsicallyneither master nor slave, but actually came to require it. Unless there issome way of resurrecting Christianity as the binding force in modern life(and thereby denying the pluralism that MacIntyre otherwise so eloquentlydefends), the dilemmas of rational choice theory are deeply written intomodern moral reality. (It is worth noting, though, that althoughMacIntyredefends pluralism, he never endorses liberalism as the best account of thatmodern form of pluralism.5)Indeed, if there are no natural masters and no natural slaves, then the

Kantian way of framing the issue becomes all the more compelling: Failing

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an appeal to nature, we can only appeal to our own reason as that to whichwe must subordinate our wills, but failing a metaphysical conception ofreason, we must understand rationality as expressing our own spontaneity,as being an activity that in its normative dimension is underdetermined (ifnot fully undetermined) by nature. In that respect, bothKant andMacIntyrebegin from the same point. Kant’s critique of all traditional, supersensiblemetaphysics was supposed to put aside once and for all any appeal to naturalgoods via a conception of some kind of perfection of human nature (and, soit seems, MacIntyre himself seems implicitly to accept the basic premisesof the Kantian critique of traditional metaphysics).What setsMacIntyre apart fromKant is his insistence that such practical

reasoning cannot begin in a vacuum but must instead begin with normsthat, viewed from the standpoint of embodied reasoning agents, are notmatters of legislation at all but instead furnish the substantive conditions ofall further self-legislation. In that respect, MacIntyre is as far as he could befrom Kant and his followers who insist on a fundamental independence forpractical reason, an ability to step outside of all traditions and to evaluatethem from a standpoint not indebted to any tradition at all. For practicalreason to function as a reason and not as something that simply “fits” intothe working of the organism, it must incorporate a set of commitments thatthemselves depend on a collectively shared form of life. Such a background,prereflective shared form of life is necessary to orient people; in living outone’s life, one is oriented to taken-for-granted notions of the goods of thatform of life – what we have called the “moral reality” of that form of life –that in turn structure one’s practical reasoning as a kind of skill, a know-howin making one’s way around in that life. There is and can be, however, nosense to the notion of any basic good or presupposition in a form of lifebeing immune to criticism, and even though many things must be taken forgranted in any way of life, we always simply “find” ourselves in a historicalcommunity for whom some things simply “are”, at least from our point ofview on them, goods.To make that same point, Hegel cited Antigone’s line about ethical

norms – “Not now, nor yesterday’s, they always live/and no one knowsfrom whence they came”6 – as expressing the experience of those basicauthoritative norms as matters to which we must simply keep faith, thatare not optional for us. Hegel goes on in that passage to elaborate whatthat experientially means: “They are. If they are supposed to be legitimatedthroughmy insight, then I have already set their unwavering being-in-itselfin motion and regard them as something that, for me, perhaps might betrue and perhaps might not be true.” That is, they have to be binding on us


even if ultimately they are not themselves immune to historical breakdown.We must adopt a stance of moral realism about those norms even as weinsist on their relativity to what historically counts as a reason for us, andon their consequent revisability.MacIntyre, likeHegel, rejects a conception of this kind of moral realism

as being only an “as-if” realism, something that, while it must “appear” tous as “not now, nor yesterday’s, they always live,” is in fact only a contingentcreation by human beings pursuing other contingent ends. BothMacIntyreand Hegel follow Kant’s lead in rejecting the idea that being a moral real-ist in this sense either requires reducing moral norms to something morerespectable to contemporary naturalists or requires positing Platonic ide-alities to which our statements about them correspond. To be a realist inthis sense is only to claim that we can show that there are good reasonsfor doing one thing as opposed to another, and that requires us to workout the conception of what counts as a good reason. If we can show thatthere is a genuinely good reason to do something, that is enough to claim arealism about those goods. However, like Hegel, MacIntyre also is deeplysuspicious that there is a single conception of reason that spans all historicalperiods and all civilizations that is substantive enough to do all the work ofshowing us what counts as a “good” reason. Practical reasons are dependenton our conceptions of substantive goods, and no generalized notion of rea-son detached from all social and historical context will be weighty enoughto do the heavy lifting that so many modern philosophers have requiredof it.There is also no sense in MacIntyre, as there is in many other critics of

modernity and antimodernists, that there is simply some kind of irresolv-able, tragic conflict in human nature (between, for example, the passionsand intellect, or between attempts to hold fast to rules while not beingable to abide by them) that blocks any rational answer to social problems.MacIntyre, like Hegel, seems at least to hold out for the possibility fora reconciliation – a Versohnung in Hegel’s rather charged theological im-agery – among citizens of the modern world that is based on reason andnot on something else such as tradition or revelation. Although this mightseem to be at odds with MacIntyre’s well-known appeal to the “authorityof tradition” in After Virtue, nonetheless even there the “authority of tradi-tion” is invoked in order to provide underpinnings for the social-practiceaccount of rationality that is central to the account of the virtues in thatwork. If we are to avoid the difficulties (both conceptual and practical) ina conception of reason that has to claim that it starts from nowhere (as ifwe always had to deliberate on the principles of deliberation, ad infinitum,

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before we could ever reason), then we need an account of how we alwaysstart from somewhere, particularly from some historically located point,and an account of how we could ever come to be in a position whereby wecould rationally revise those standards. (MacIntyre by and large avoids theover-intellectualistic bent of neo-Kantian attempts to provide some kind ofgeneral and relatively formal test for rational permissibility with his ownmore existential and practice-based account of why certain conceptions ofpractical reason turn out to be unlivable.)Central to MacIntyre’s account of practical reason, as we have seen,

is the refusal to separate it into some rock-bottom distinction of “form”and “content” and to argue instead that our conceptions of what countsas good reasoning is linked to our conceptions of those substantive goodsabout which we are reasoning. In that light, the appeal to the “authorityof tradition” is necessary since it is only in certain social relationships andby building and sustaining certain forms of character that we are able toreason well at all. However, MacIntyre does not subscribe to an accountof social life that holds that “the authority of tradition” is the final, nonre-visable stopping point at which all questioning must stop and that citizenscan at best reconcile themselves with each other – understand what has tobe endured, hoped for, and sacrificed – only when they all submit to the“authority of tradition” even where there can be no rational account ofwhy that tradition could or should hold their allegiance. The “authority oftradition” is itself subject to assessment by reason, even if the capacities forgood reason are not capacities that can be exercised outside of some appealto such authority.MacIntyre’s ownmoral realism therefore has tomake room for the other

idea implicit in his view that moral reality can itself come to change associal practices change and the substantive goods that are part and parcelof our practical reasoning therefore change. Thus, there are true and falsejudgments to be made within changeable moral realities; the judgmentsmade within one such moral reality are incommensurable with judgmentsmade in the other; and somemoral realities can be shown tobemore rationalthan others (and hence better as offering more sustainable lives) by virtueof the way in which they emerge for MacIntyre as answering the problemsraised in some other failed tradition.MacIntyre’s own commitment to the primacy of practical reason (along

with his rejection of Kantian dualisms about form and content in reason-ing) puts him squarely into the post-Kantian camp, however Aristotelianand Thomistic he might otherwise wish to be, and that makes it difficult tosee just how he could think that that modernity itself could be defeated in


the way he apparently thinks it can. For example, he thinks that his social-practice conception of reason is not simply one option among many buthas itself come to be required of us by virtue of the way in which the socialrealities of our time have “defeated” its immediate competitors, such as thenineteenth-century encyclopedic version of rationality discussed in ThreeRival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. Inthat book, MacIntyre argued that by virtue of the Victorians understandingof their particular conception of rationality as universal, they necessarilyput themselves in the position of being unable to treat other competingversions in their own terms, and thus were able only to redescribe theirown competitors (particularly those in non-European cultures) as merelyfailed versions of themselves, and to understand themselves as markers of“progress” beyond the superstitions of the European past and the contem-porary non-European world (Three Rival Versions, pp. 21–22). The break-down of that encyclopedic project had to do with the way in which theirassumption of a single, substantive rationality to which all educated personswould obviously consent fell apart under the pressure of both Nietzscheancriticism and the crises brought about by the Great War, which elicitedin turn a dark skepticism about the European way of life as embodyinginevitable progress in comparison with all others (Three Rival Versions,pp. 23–24).Against that,MacIntyre has famously argued for aThomist understand-

ing of the failure of modern morality (the successor to and continuation ofthe encyclopedic project) as being due to the fact that it is only a set of “frag-mentary survivals posing problems that cannot fail to be insoluble so longas they are not restored to their places in those wholes fromwhich they tooktheir character as parts” (Three Rival Versions, p. 192). Given MacIntyre’sown social-practice account of reason, for his argument against moder-nity to work and for Thomism to defeat modernity the social wholes thatare necessary for Thomist reasoning to be successful would themselveshave to be reconstituted – the medieval way of life would have to be re-vived – and there is simply no reason to think that is possible. For it to bepossible, the kind of pluralism that gives rise to the problems of incom-mensurability would itself have to be overcome, and everything MacIntyresays seems to constitute an argument to the effect that it cannot, that plu-ralism is a necessary, even rationally required component of the modernworld.7

The very primacy that he gives to reason and his emphasis on change-able moral reality is itself the result of the rupture in human time that heotherwise wishes to deplore, and the very conception of the primacy of

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practical reason itself as forming the basis by which moral reality is consti-tuted is itself the result of the breakdown of those earlier medieval wholes;medieval agents did not somuch lose an argument with themoderns as theycame to discover that they simply could no longer be those types of peo-ple any more – indeed, for all the kinds of reasons that MacIntyre himselflays out.MacIntyre is thus left with a conception of modernity that is definitely

not encyclopedic but is nonetheless inevitably “negative” in character. Cen-tral to all of MacIntyre’s arguments about the incommensurability of fun-damentally different viewpoints – nicely captured in the title of his book,Whose Justice? Which Rationality? – is a form of what Hegelians would callmodern self-consciousness, namely the verymodern suspicion that what wehave taken as fixed and eternal is perhaps only the posit of a contingent, evenarbitrary viewpoint, or perhaps only the expression of some hidden poweror interest. That view – against which the Victorian encyclopedic view is atbest a holding maneuver, an attempt to affirm an industrial and colonialistself-understanding as resting on eternally fixed norms – itself provokes thekind of eternal dissatisfaction with itself that is most fundamentally char-acteristic of modernity, a capacity to continually undermine itself in lightof the failure of its own standards of rationality to prove themselves free ofcontingency and interest.MacIntyre shares with both Hegel and Wittgenstein the view that

definitive of the modern standpoint is the double awareness of the his-torical and social contingency of all our points of view and the necessity toprovide justifications of those points of view, which itself forms the basic,underlying tension in all modern life and culture. Hegel metaphoricallydescribed this as the eternal production of the opposition of subjective andobjective points of view and their eternal reconciliation – the recognitionof the contingency of our norms and the equal necessity to justify them – atension which Robert Pippin has encapsulated as “unending modernity.”8

There is no reason to think that there is anything on the horizon other thanwhat MacIntyre has described as the clash of incommensurable viewpointsand the necessity to adopt standards of justification that take that clash intoconsideration – and that just is modernity, something radical, somethingthat cannot be overcome and that is therefore “absolute.”9

This of course replaces a morality and politics of perfection with one ofself-determination, but it cannot see this self-determination as free-floating,purely spontaneous, and able to generate its principles autonomously out ofitself. Instead, it is a historically circumscribed form of self-determination.Moral and political action and reflection always begins in a particular,


historical situation, and what is always “given” to us is not some set ofnondefeasible norms or fixed standards of rationality but only the inheritedsocial and historical situation in which we find ourselves. We always begin,that is, within a contingently formed point of view, and to be a responsi-ble modern ethical agent requires acknowledgment of that contingency, arecognition that what we take as the exigencies of the world – “the waythe world is” – might themselves be only expressions of some particularinterest or serving the goals of some particular, contingent powers. WhatMacIntyre stresses (and what links him with the post-Kantians) is the fail-ure of a purely individualist understanding of our agency to make sense ofthat historical embeddedness. His book, Dependent Rational Animals: WhyHuman Beings Need the Virtues, brings out quite clearly his emphasis on theacknowledgment of mutual dependency as opposed to the fantasy, perhapsinfantile in origin, of complete and utter independence in moral reasoning.Only through a properly structured set of mutual dependencies can we evenbecome independent practical reasoners at all.10 The truly vexatious side ofmodern market society forMacIntyre seems to be the way in which its idealof and celebration of the sovereign consumer and the independent citizeneffectively mask the layers of dependencies that are necessary for such at-tempts at individualism even to get going. Modern “individualist” societythus effectively undermines itself, having to preserve the structures of mu-tual dependency against which it then rebels and that, from the standpointof individualist modernism’s self-understanding, can only appear as irra-tional (instead of being seen as what they are, the condition of independentpractical reasoning itself).MacIntyre’s critique of modernity is thus a critique from within moder-

nity itself, even though it is often clothed as a rejection of themodernworld,a call for a lost medieval and Thomist past. On his own terms, modernityrepresents a radical breakwith the past, and on his own terms, it is not some-thing to be overcome in a new epoch. A “new Saint Benedict” would be amodern Saint Benedict, preserving the virtues appropriate to an individualistway of life by fostering the social structures that make our proper mutualdependencies apparent and rational, which would abolish the structuresof exploitation that currently pervade the falsely understood and compre-hended modern world. If he in fact accomplished that task, he would do itnot as a SaintBenedict at all but only aMr. orMs. Benedict, an equal citizenof a modern, constitutionalist political order. Indeed, MacIntyre’s emphasison the necessity of acknowledging contingency and the incommensurabil-ity of points of view, the necessity of preserving a notion of truth that isnot reducible to “warranted assertability” (not relative, that is, to particular

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points of view), and the necessity of justifying ourselves to each other inorder to hold ourselves mutually to norms that are livable and rational,make him a modernist per excellence – much more so than those who insiston a noncontingent, nonperspectival notion of reason and a context-freecelebration of science, and much, much more so than those who vapidlyinsist on the relativity of everything.

Notes

1. This seems to be the point of the question asked in the title ofWhose Justice?WhichRationality?MacIntyre makes it clear that this does not rule out any more generalconception of the good. For example, in Dependent Rational Animals (p. 67),MacIntyre says:We therefore need to distinguish between what it is that makes certaingoods goods and goods to be valued for their own sake from what it isthat makes it good for this particular individual or this particular societyin this particular situation to make them objects of her or his or theireffective practical regard. And our judgments about how it is best for anindividual or a community to order the goods in their lives exemplify thisthird type of ascription, one whereby we judge unconditionally about whatit is best for individuals or groups to be or do or have not only qua agentsengaged in this or that form of activity in this or that role or roles, but alsoqua human being. It is these judgments that are judgments about humanflourishing.

Nonetheless, even when we begin from a premise such as “such and such isunqualifiedly the good and the best,” our reasoning cannot reach its conclu-sion unless it is also mediated by deliberation on things like “what meanswill achieve the good and the best in the type of situation in which I findmyself?”

2. Whose Justice?, pp. 356–357:The mind is adequate to its objects insofar as the expectations which itframes on the basis of these activities are not liable to disappointment andthe remembering which it engages in enables it to return to and recoverwhat it had encountered previously, whether the objects themselves arestill present or not . . . One of the great originating insights of tradition-constituted inquiries is that false beliefs and false judgments represent afailure of themind, not of its objects. It is themind which stands in need ofcorrection. So themost primitive conception of truth is of themanifestnessof the objects which present themselves to mind; and it is when mind failsto re-present that manifestness that falsity, the inadequacy of mind to itsobjects, appears.

See also Three Rival Versions, pp. 121–122.3. See Three Rival Versions:

The rational superiority of that tradition to rival traditions is held to residein its capacity not only for identifying and characterizing the limitations


and failures of that rival tradition as judged by that rival tradition’s ownstandards, limitations and failures which that rival tradition itself lacksthe resources to explain or understand, but also for explaining and un-derstanding those limitations and failures in some tolerably precise way.Moreover it must be the case that the rival tradition lacks the capacitysimilarly to identify, characterize, and explain limitations and failures ofthe Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. (p. 181)

4. On the one hand, since MacIntyre clearly subscribes to some version of natu-ral law, there is a very extended sense in which he believes that nature, suitablydescribed, does in fact set the law for us, and, as he makes it clear in DependentRational Animals, he thinks our rational capacities should be counted as real-izations of a human nature. But even there he still qualifies those capacities associal and thus not as something to be developed out of some account merelyof our biological nature. MacIntyre’s endorsement of natural law therefore turnson how much weight is to be put on the notion of our rational, social natures asrealizations of our more directly biological nature.

5. There are those who find it odd even to claim that MacIntyre defends plu-ralism, but they overlook the many passages in which he does so. For exam-ple, in the concluding chapter of Three Rival Versions, he argues against AllenBloom’s and William Bennett’s claims for reinstituting a “great books” programsince until the problem of how to read those books has been resolved, “suchlists do not rise to the status of a concrete proposal” (p. 228). He adds thattheyoften defend it as a way of restoring to us and to our students what theyspeak of as our cultural tradition; but we are in fact the inheritors . . . of anumber of rival and incompatible traditions and there is no way of eitherselecting a list of books to be read or advancing a determinate account ofhow they are to be read . . . which does not involve taking a partisan standin the conflict of traditions.

In such a pluralist society, the appropriate role of the university is to be a “place ofconstrained disagreement, of imposed participation in conflict, in which a centralresponsibility of higher education would be to initiate students into conflict.”MacIntyre does believe that a unified consensus on what is good is a necessarycondition of a fully flourishing social life, but he also claims in various placesthat imposing such unity on the heterogeneity of modern life would not itself bea good:[T]he shared public goods of the modern nation-sate are not the commongoods of a genuine nation-wide community and, when the nation-statemasquerades as the guardian of such a common good, the outcome isbound to be either ludicrous or disastrous or both . . . In a modern, large-scale nation-state no such collectivity is possible and the pretense that it isis always an ideological disguise for sinister realities. (Dependent RationalAnimals, p. 132)

6. Hegel 1988, p. 286: “Sie sind.Wenn sie sich meiner Einsicht legitimieren sollen,so habe ich schon ihr unwankendes Ansichsein bewegt, und betrachte sie alsetwas, das vielleicht wahr, vielleicht auch nicht wahr fur mich sei.”

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7. There are some other important tendencies inMacIntyre’s thought that seem toinvolve restricting Aristotelian-Thomist reasoning to being appropriate onlyto the way of life of small communities, such that: something like it always tendsto emerge whenever a small enough community with the requisite consensus onhuman flourishing comes to be; the realm of “empire” therefore has been andwill continue to be inimical to such “communal” Thomism; and such reasoningis a realization of our natural powers that nonetheless point us beyond ourselvestoward our dependencies on a power greater than us, and that, when realized,lead us to acknowledge our own lack of self-sufficiency. However, this view(if it is indeed part of MacIntyre’s view) rests on a much less historicist thesisthan does much of the rest of MacIntyre’s thought, since it claims in effect thatAristotelian-Thomist reasoning naturally grows out of a certain basic humanreality instead of growing out of a certain very determinate historical and socialpractice. Thus the question is whether Thomism is tied to the practices thatgave rise to it, or whether it can make a more universalistic claim to being theappropriate mode of reasoning of all those small communities that have escapedcorruption by the temptations of empire.

8. See Hegel 1971b, pp. 459–460:Pure thought has progressed to the opposition of the subjective and objec-tive; and the true reconciliation is the insight that this opposition, pushedto its absolute peak, dissolves itself, that in itself, as Schelling says, the op-positions are identical, and not only in themselves but rather that eternallife is this, to eternally produce opposition and eternally to reconcile it.

On “unending modernity,” see Pippin 1991 (the phrase “unending modernity”is Pippin’s).

9. In that context, it is significant thatHegel himself characterized “absolute know-ing” as just the comprehension of the necessity of that fundamental, nondefeasi-ble tension inmodern life. SeeHegel 1971b, p. 460: “Absolute knowing is knowingthe opposition within the unity and the unity within the opposition; and science(Wissenschaft) is knowing this unity in its whole development through itself.”

10. The notion of structured dependencies is also a major theme in Rousseau. SeeNeuhouser 1993, pp. 363–395. A brilliant elaboration of the relatedness andthe ineluctability of these paired notions of dependence and independence is tobe found in Pippin 2000.

Bibliography

This bibliography consists of four sections. The first section includes allbooks authored or edited by MacIntyre. The second section includes allof the articles by MacIntyre cited in this book as well as a number of hisother more important papers. The third section is a selected bibliographyof works aboutMacIntyre, and the fourth section includes other works citedin this volume.All books authored or edited by MacIntyre are cited in this volume by

abbreviated title; all other works are cited by the author’s last name andthe year of publication. Second and later editions are cited by the year ofpublication of the first edition; the year of publication of the cited editionis given in brackets.

1. Books Authored or Edited by MacIntyre

1951. The Significance of Moral Judgments. M.A. Thesis, University of Manchester.Unpublished. Cited as Significance of Moral Judgments.

1953.Marxism: An Interpretation. SCM Press. Cited asMarxism: An Interpretation.1955. New Essays in Philosophical Theology (edited, with Antony Flew). Macmillan.Cited as New Essays.

1957. Metaphysical Beliefs: Three Essays (with Stephen Toulmin and RonaldW. Hepburn). SCM Press. Cited asMetaphysical Beliefs.

1958. The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Cited asUnconscious.

1959. Difficulties in Christian Belief. SCM Press.1965. Hume’s Ethical Writings (edited). Collier.1966. A Short History of Ethics. Macmillan. Cited as Short History.1967. Secularization and Moral Change. Oxford University Press.1968.Marxism and Christianity. Schocken. Cited asMarxism and Christianity.1970. Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic. Viking.1971. Against the Self-Images of the Age. University of Notre Dame Press. Cited as

Self-Images.1972. Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays (edited). Anchor. Cited as Hegel.

201

202 Bibliography

1981 [1984]. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed. University of NotreDame Press. Cited as After Virtue.

1983. Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy (edited with StanleyHauerwas). University of Notre Dame Press. Cited as Revisions.

1988. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? University of Notre Dame Press. Cited asWhose Justice?.

1990. First Principles, Final Ends, and Contemporary Philosophical Issues. MarquetteUniversity Press. Cited as First Principles.

1990. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition.University of Notre Dame Press. Cited as Three Rival Versions.

1998. The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Kelvin Knight. University of Notre Dame Press.Cited asMacIntyre Reader.

1999.Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Open Court.Cited as Dependent Rational Animals.

2. Articles and Reviews by MacIntyre

1950. “Analogy in Metaphysics.” Downside Review 69, pp. 45–61.1955a. “Cause and Cure in Psychotherapy.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 29(supplement), pp. 43–58.

1955b. “The Nature and Destiny of Man: Getting the Question Clear.” ModernChurchman 45, pp. 171–176.

1955c. “A Note on Immortality.”Mind 64, pp. 396–399.1955d. “Visions.” In New Essays, pp. 254–260.1956. “Marxist Tracts.” Philosophical Quarterly 6, pp. 366–370.1957a. “Determinism.”Mind 66, pp. 28–41.1957b. “The Logical Status of Religious Beliefs.” In Metaphysical Beliefs, pp. 157–201.

1957c. “What Morality Is Not.” Philosophy 32, pp. 325–335. Cited to reprintedversion in Self-Images, pp. 96–108.

1958. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness I.” New Reasoner 7, pp. 90–100. Cited toreprinted version inMacIntyre Reader, pp. 31–40.

1959a. “Hume on ‘Is’ and ‘Ought.’ ” Philosophical Review 68, pp. 451–468. Cited toreprinted version in Self-Images, pp. 109–124.

1959b. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness II.” New Reasoner 8, pp. 89–98. Cited toreprinted version inMacIntyre Reader, pp. 41–49.

1960. “Purpose and Intelligent Action.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 34(supp.), pp. 79–96.

1962. “A Note about Causality in the Social Sciences.” In Laslett and Runciman1962, pp. 48–70.

1965a. “Imperatives, Reasons for Action, and Morals.” Journal of Philosophy 62,pp. 513–523. Cited to reprinted version in Self-Images, pp. 125–135.

Bibliography 203

1965b. “Pleasure as aReason forAction.”Monist 49, pp. 215–233.Cited to reprintedversion in Self-Images, pp. 173–190.

1965c. “Weber at His Weakest.” Encounter 25, pp. 27–37.1966a. “The Antecedents of Action.” In Williams and Montefiore 1966, pp. 205–225. Cited to reprinted version in Self-Images, pp. 191–210.

1966b. “Recent Political Philosophy.” In Thompson 1966, pp. 189–200.1967a. “The Idea of a Social Science.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 41 (supp.),pp. 95–114. Cited to reprinted version in Self-Images, pp. 211–229.

1967b.ReviewofRudner 1966.British Journal for the Philosophy of Science18, pp. 344–345.

1967c. Review of Levi-Strauss 1966. Philosophical Quarterly 17, pp. 559–561.1968. “Son of Ideology” (review of Lichtheim 1967). New York Review of Books 10(9), pp. 26–28.

1969. Review of Brodbeck 1968. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 20,pp. 174–175.

1970. “Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?” In Wilson 1970,pp. 62–77.

1971a. “Emotion, Behavior, and Belief.” In Self-Images, pp. 230–243.1971b. “The End of Ideology and the End of the End of Ideology.” In Self-Images,pp. 3–11.

1971c. “Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?” In Self-Images, pp. 260–279.

1971d. “Ought.” In Self-Images, pp. 136–156.1971e. “Rationality and the Explanation of Action.” In Self-Images, pp. 244–259.

1971f. “Some More about ‘Ought’.” In Self-Images, pp. 157–172.1972a. “Hegel on Faces and Skulls.” In Hegel, pp. 219–236.1972b. “Justice: A New Theory and Some Old Questions” (review of Rawls 1971).

Boston University Law Review 52, pp. 330–334.1972c. “Praxis and Action.” (Review of Bernstein 1972.) Review of Metaphysics 25,pp. 737–744.

1973a. “The Essential Contestability of Some Social Concepts.” Ethics 84,pp. 1–9.

1973b. “Ideology, Social Science, and Revolution.” Comparative Politics 5, pp. 321–342.

1974. “Durkheim’s Call to Order” (review of Lukes 1973).New York Review of Books7, pp. 25–26.

1975. “Toward a Theory of Medical Fallibility” (with Samuel Gorowitz). HastingsCenter Report 5, pp 13–23.

1976. “Causality and History.” In Manninen and Tuomela 1976, pp. 137–158.1977a. “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy ofScience.”Monist 60, pp. 453–472.

204 Bibliography

1977b. “Utilitarianism and the Presuppositions of Cost-Benefit Analysis.” In Sayre1977, pp. 217–237.

1978a. “Behaviorism: Philosophical Analysis.” In Reich 1978, pp. 110–115.1978b. “Objectivity in Morality and Objectivity in Science.” In Englehardt andCallahan 1978, pp. 21–39.

1978c. “What Has Ethics to Learn from Medical Ethics?” Annual Proceedings of theCenter for Philosophic Exchange 2, pp. 37–47.

1978d.ReviewofGellner 1974.British Journal for the Philosophy of Science29, pp. 105–110.

1979a. Review of Benn and Mortimore 1976. American Journal of Sociology 85,pp. 217–219.

1979b. Review of Berlin 1979. New Republic 9, pp. 113–114.1979c. Review of Sills 1979. New York Review of Books 27, pp. 14–16.1981. “The Nature of the Virtues: From Homer to Benjamin Franklin.” Hastings

Center Report 11, pp. 27–34.1982a. “How Moral Agents Became Ghosts: Or, Why the History of EthicsDivided from That of the Philosophy of Mind.” Synthese 53, pp. 295–312.

1982b. “Philosophy and Its History.” Analyse und Kritik 4, pp. 102–113.1983a. “The Indispensability of Political Theory.” In Miller and Siedentop 1983,pp. 17–33.

1983b. “The Magic in the Pronoun ‘My’ ” (review of Williams 1981). Ethics 94,pp. 113–125.

1983c. “Moral Philosophy: What Next?” In Revisions, pp. 1–15.1983d. “Moral Rationality, Tradition, and Authority: A Response to O’Neill, Gaita,and Clark.” Inquiry 26, pp. 447–466.

1983e. “Philosophy of Politics.” In Capps 1983, pp. 131–161.1984a. “After Virtue and Marxism: A Response to Wartofsky.” Inquiry 27, pp. 251–254.

1984b. “Bernstein’s Distorting Mirrors.” Soundings 67, pp. 30–41.1984c. “The Claims of After Virtue.” Analyse und Kritik 6, pp. 498–513.1984d. “Does Applied Ethics Rest on a Mistake?”Monist 67, pp. 498–513.1984e. “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” Lindley Lecture at the University of Kansas. Citedto reprinted version in Beiner 1995, pp. 209–228.

1984f. “The Relationship of Philosophy to Its Past.” In Rorty, Schneewind, andSkinner 1984, pp. 31–48.

1985. “Relativism, Power, and Philosophy.” Proceedings and Addresses of the AmericanPhilosophical Association, pp. 5–22.

1986a. “The Intelligibility of Action.” In Margolis, Krausz, and Burian 1986,pp. 63–80.

1986b. “Positivism, Sociology, and Practical Reason: Notes onDurkheim’s Suicide.”In Perovich and Wedlin 1986, pp. 87–104.

Bibliography 205

1986c. “WhichGodOughtWe toObey, andWhy?” Faith and Philosophy 3, pp. 359–371.

1987a. “CanOne BeUnintelligible to Oneself?” InMcKnight and Stchedroff 1987,pp. 23–37.

1987b. “Practical Rationalities as Forms of Social Structure.” Irish Journalof Philosophy 4, pp. 3–19. Cited to reprinted version in MacIntyre Reader,pp. 120–135.

1988a. “The Objectivity of Good.” Mackay Memorial Lecture. St. Lawrence Uni-versity.

1988b. “Poetry as Political Philosophy: Notes on Burke and Yeats.” In Bell andLerner 1988, pp. 145–157.

1988c. “Sophrosune: How aVirtueCan Become SociallyDisruptive.”Midwest Studiesin Philosophy 13, pp. 1–11.

1990a. “The Form of the Good, Tradition, and Enquiry.” In Gaita 1990, pp. 242–262.

1990b. “Individual and Social Morality in Japan and in the United States: RivalConceptions of the Self.” Philosophy East and West 40, pp. 489–497.

1990c. “Moral Dilemmas.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (supp.),pp. 367–382.

1990d. “The Privatization of Good.”Review of Politics 52, pp. 344–361.1990e. “Rejoinder tomyCritics, Especially Solomon.”Review of Politics 52, pp. 375–377.

1991a. “An Interview with Alasdair MacIntyre.” Cogito 5, pp. 67–73. Cited toreprinted version inMacIntyre Reader, pp. 267–275.

1991b. “I’m not a Communitarian, But . . .” The Responsive Community 1, pp. 91–92.1991c. “Incommensurability, Truth, and the Conversation between Confucians andAristotelians about the Virtues.” In Deutsch 1991, pp. 104–122.

1991d. “Nietzsche or Aristotle?” In Borradori 1994, pp. 137–152.Cited to reprintedversion inMacIntyre Reader, pp. 255–266.

1992a. “Colors, Cultures, and Practices.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17,pp. 1–23.

1992b. “Plain Persons andMoral Philosophy: Rules, Virtues, andGoods.”AmericanCatholic Philosophical Quarterly 66, pp. 3–19.

1992c. “What Has Not Happened in Moral Philosophy.” Yale Journal of Criticism 5,pp. 193–199.

1994a. “How Can We Learn What Veritatis Splendor Has to Teach?” Thomist 58,pp. 171–195.

1994b. “Kinesis Interview with Professor Alasdair MacIntyre.” Kinesis 20,pp. 34–47.

1994c. “Moral Relativism, Truth, and Justification.” In Gormally 1994, pp. 6–24.1994d. “Moral Theory Put to the Question.” American Philosophical AssociationSymposium paper.

1994e. “My Station and Its Virtues.” Journal of Philosophical Research 19, pp. 1–8.

206 Bibliography

1994f. “A Partial Response to My Critics.” In Horton and Mendus 1994, pp. 283–304.

1994g. “The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken.” In Gould and Cohen1994, pp. 277–290. Cited to reprinted version in MacIntyre Reader, pp. 223–234.

1995a. “The Spectre of Communitarianism.” Radical Philosophy 70, pp. 34–35.1995b. “Truthfulness, Lies, and Moral Philosophers: What Can We Learn fromMill and Kant?” In Peterson 1995, pp. 307–361.

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Index

Abelard, Peter, 63–66Adams, Robert M., 108After Virtue project, seeMacIntyre, Alasdair,

After Virtue project ofAnnas, Julia, 67n2Anscombe, G. E. M., 74, 94–95, 97, 111n4,

141anti-theoryMacIntyre’s response to, 145–147as a view in normative ethics, 145

Aquinas, Thomas, 51, 57–59, 102–103,109–110, 135, 177; see alsoThomism

Aristotelian science, 50–52as related to tradition-grounded inquiry,51

Aristotelianism, 30, 38, 44–45, 116, 138Aristotle, 39–40, 41–42, 59, 74, 87,

135–136, 177; see also AristotelianismAugustinianism, 58–59Austin, J. L., 108Ayer, A. J., 117, 149n3, 149n4Azande, 82–84beliefs of, as a closed system, 79–80

Barth, Karl, 76Bellah, Robert, 143Bernard of Clairvaux, 65–66Bernstein, Eduard, 3–4, 5Bernstein, Richard, 54Blackstone, William, 25–26, 28Broad, C. D., 94Burke, Edmund, 112

Caenegem, R. C. van, 68–69n21“character,” MacIntyre’s concept of,

150n10Christianity, 2, 85–86, 113n12; see also

MacIntyre, Alasdair, and ChristianityClerke, Agnes Mary, 58Collingwood, R. G., 10–11, 17common good, 160–161contrasted with public interest, 161

communitarianism, 142, 159

Constable, Giles, 68–69n21Cooley, Charles Horton, 91

Davidson, Donald, 49Dawson, Christopher, 89Descartes, Rene, 47, 111n3Durkheim, Emile, 90

Eliot, T. S., 89–90emotivism, 5, 15–16, 39, 132, 133–134Engels, Friedrich, 17Enlightenment, 43, 176–177project of justifying morality, 34, 96–97,135–136, 152, 156, 177

epistemological crisis, 47–48, 87–88, 104ethics, see moral philosophyEvans-Pritchard, E. E., 83–84, 86

fact/value distinction, 99–100, 107Feyerabend, Paul, 87–88Finnis, John, 168, 175n5Flett, John, 90Flew, Antony, 9n6Foot, Philippa, 118, 124Foucault, Michel, 112n6fragmentation, as feature of modern

morality, 100, 107Freud, Sigmund, 72–73Fukuyama, Francis, 142

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 115Garcia, J. L. A., 107Geach, Peter, 118, 141Goffman, Erving, 15Green, Leslie, 158Grisez, Germain, 107Gutting, Gary, 113n11, 113n13, 113n16

Haldane, John, 33–34, 98Hall, Mark, 175n1Hare, R. M., 118, 122, 124, 127Hart, H. L. A., 92n5, 156, 169Hegel, G. W. F., 24, 29, 34–35, 47, 192–193,

196, 200n8, 200n9

221

222 Index

Heidegger, Martin, 177, 189history of philosophy, and its relation to

philosophyCollingwood on, 10–11MacIntyre on, 7, 11–37Marx and Engels on, 17Oakeshott on, 17–18

Honore, A. M., 92n5Hudelson, Richard, 3Hume, David, 20, 24, 26, 28, 99, 111n5Humeanism, 135Husserl, Edmund, 115Hutcheson, Francis, 20, 24

“identifications”as a defective form of argument, 91as a kind of social scientific argument,70–71, 79

ideology, 2–3, 17, 82and tradition, 8n2

individualism, 14–15, 100, 107, 169–170,181–182, 188

institutionspolitical, 164and practices, 164

intelligibility, 41, 78, 86intuitionism, 120, 149n6

Jacobi, F. H., 176, 177Jung, Carl, 97justice, 43–44, 98, 102–103, 156–158,

166–167

Kant, Immanuel, 185, 186, 190, 192; see alsoKantianism

Kantianism, 5, 135Kautsky, Karl, 3–4Kenny, Anthony, 71Kent, Bonnie, 68n19Khruschev, Nikolai, 3, 8n3Kierkegaard, Søren, 136, 150n15Klosko, George, 156, 175n1Knight, Kelvin, 2Kolakowski, Leszek, 92n3Kovesi, Julius, 68n16Kuhn, Thomas, 80, 81–82, 87–88, 104, 141

Lawrence, C. H., 68–69n21Leo XIII, 58Levi-Strauss, Claude, 112n6liberalism, 43, 101–102, 114, 159Lisska, Anthony, 168Little, Lester K., 68–69n21Locke, John, 15

MacIntyre, AlasdairAfter Virtue project of, 1, 7–8

and Christianity, 102, 110, 114, 151n22and Marxism, 2, 3–6, 8–9n6, 101, 102narrative of scholarly work of, 1

Maritain, Jacques, 115Marx, Karl, 17, 111; see alsoMarxismMarxism, 2–7, 11n12, 79; see alsoMacIntyre,

Alasdair, and Marxismhumanistic, 3–5, 6scientific, 3–5, 6

McLaurin, Colin, 22McMylor, Peter, 4Mead, G. H., 91Meilaender, Gilbert, 107metaethics, 117–128Hare’s and MacIntyre’s criticisms of,122–124

and historical investigation, 121–122,126–127

MacIntyre’s criticisms of contemporary,120–128

in MacIntyre’s master’s thesis, 118–120naturalistic, MacIntyre’s criticisms of, 127prescriptivist, MacIntyre’s criticisms of,122–124, 127–128

in the twentieth century, 117–118metaphysical biology, 38, 40, 43, 138modernity, 176MacIntyre’s critique of, 144–145, 177–198

Moore, G. E., 95, 117moral philosophymetaethical, see metaethicsmodern, MacIntyre’s criticisms of, 96–106normative, see normative ethics

morality, as socially and historicallyembedded, 6–7, 11–12, 13–16, 37,86–87, 133–134

Morris, Christopher S., 153Murphy, Mark C., 175n5

Nagel, Thomas, 150n16, 151n21narrative unity of a life, as related to virtues,

41–42, 139natural law, 167–170and absolute precepts, 167–168how known, 168and natural rights, 169–170as procedural, 167as substantive, 167–168

natural rights, 39, 169–170naturalism, in metaethics, see metaethics,

naturalisticNederman, Cary, 56Neuhouser, Frederick, 200n10New Reasoner, 5, 8n4Nietzsche, Friedrich, 27, 57, 96, 136, 137nihilism, 176

Index 223

normative ethicsanti-theory in, see anti-theoryMacIntyre’s Aristotelianism in, 137–141MacIntyre’s contribution to, 116MacIntyre’s nonstandard views in,130–131

standard categories in, 130nostalgia, charge of, against MacIntyre’s

work, 177–178, 180–181Nozick, Robert, 112n8, 156Nussbaum, Martha, 112n8

Oakeshott, Michael, 17–18, 89Olson, Charles, 110‘ought’ judgments, 98–99, 123–128

paradigms, 81–82Pareto, Wilfredo, 73Parfit, Derek, 129, 151n21particularity requirement, 158patriotism, 158, 165–166perspectivism, 45–46Pippin, Robert, 200n8, 200n10Polanyi, Michael, 79, 88–89, 178–179,

180as influence on MacIntyre, 178–179

political justifications, 152–153politics, 152–175of local community, 160–165, 170–175and natural law, 167–170as a practice, 162–165and shared culture, 165state, 152

Popper, Karl, 81, 90practical rationality, 182–183, 184–186, 188practical syllogisms, 74–75practices, 29, 90, 98, 161–164, 173–175defined, 40–41goods external to, 41, 162goods internal to, 41, 161–162, 173–175and institutions, 164and politics, 162–164as related to virtues, 40–41, 138–139

prescriptivism, 5, 122–128Prichard, Henry, 95, 117, 127proxies, 164psychoanalysis, 2, 72–73; see also Freud,

Sigmundpublic interest, 154account of political authority, 154–155contrasted with common good, 161

quasi-state, 171–172

rationality, see also practical rationalityEnlightenment ideal of, 44traditional ideal of, 44

Rawls, John, 35, 142, 153, 156,175n1

Raz, Joseph, 153, 169reasons explanation of actions, 74–75,

81–82, 84–85and causal explanation, 71–72, 77, 92n2,92n5

Reid, Thomas, 20relativism, 7, 33–34, 45–46, 84, 98, 103–105,

107–108, 198religion, philosophy of, MacIntyre’s work in,

8–9n6responsibilities, as basis for ‘ought’

judgments, 98, 99rights, see natural rightsRorty, Richard, 105Ross, W. D., 95, 117Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 191, 200n10

Sandel, Michael, 159Sartre, Jean Paul, 15, 121Schelling, F. W. J., 190Schneewind, J. B., 149n1Scottish Enlightenment, 19–27and role of philosophy in social order,21–22

Searle, John R., 68n16Simmons, A. John, 153, 158Singer, Peter, 129Smith, Adam, 20social sciences, 70–91Southern, R. W., 68–69n21Spruyt, Hendrik, 68–69n21Stair, Viscount, 21, 25–26Stalinism, 3–6, 90beliefs of, as a closed system,79–80

state, 3ad hoc cooperation with, 170modern, 152–158neutralist, 154–158nonneutralist, 159–160as potentially justifiable, 171–172quasi-state, 171–172

Stein, Edith, 115Steiner, Franz, 70, 86–87, 93n6Stevenson, Charles, 117, 118, 127, 149n3,

150n8Strawson, P. F., 120

taboo, 8n5, 86–87, 95Taylor, Charles, 108, 143teleology, 41, 103, 107, 138Thomism, 34, 51, 57–59Thompson, E. P., 8n4Thomson, Judith, 113n13Toulmin, Stephen, 118

224 Index

tradition, 187–188, 193–194; see alsotradition-grounded inquiry

and MacIntyre’s theory of virtue, 39–43,140

tradition-grounded inquiry, 24–25, 27–35,38–69, 88–91, 189–190, 192

and Aristotelian science, 51and authoritative practitioners, 60–66and crafts, 60and the encyclopaedic method, 27–28, 57and the genealogical method, 27–28, 57,105

and incommensurability, 53–55, 56and moral rationality, 53–56and perspectivism, 45–46and relativism, 33–34, 45–46and scientific reasoning, 88–90and Thomism, 33–34and truth, 46–47, 50

unconsciousFreud’s characterization of the, 72MacIntyre’s characterization of the, 72–73

Vico, Giambattista, 54virtue ethics, 40, 130–131virtuesnature of, 40–43, 138–141as related to narrative unity of a life,41–42, 139

as related to practices, 40–41, 138–139

as related to tradition, 42, 140Voltaire, 19

Waldron, Jeremy, 153, 156Weber, Max, 74, 75–78, 92n5, 179–180as influence on MacIntyre, 179–180MacIntyre’s criticisms of, 75–77, 92n4,92n5

Williams, Bernard, 68n16, 111n4, 143,145

Winch, Peter, 73–74, 79, 82–86, 88on the idea of a social science, 73–74

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 196Wokler, Robert, 12, 19–20, 25

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